


The Kansas City Shuffle Job

by arboreal_overlords



Series: we change together (the TMA Leverage AU) [1]
Category: Leverage, The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: A Found Family Steals Jon, Alternate Universe, Canon Asexual Character, Canonical Character Death, Daisy is the hitter, F/F, Found Family, Gen, Getting Together, Jon and Daisy are bffs, Leverage AU, M/M, Martin is the grifter, Melanie is the hacker, The Canonical Character Death is Sasha, Tim is the thief, past Tim/Sasha
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:21:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23605987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arboreal_overlords/pseuds/arboreal_overlords
Summary: Jonathan Sims was a rising star at the Magnus Institute, researching and tracking entity-touched individuals who used their eldritch powers for criminal purposes. Then his assistant, Sasha James, was murdered in a conspiracy involving his boss.A year later, Jon accidentally ends up saddled with a thief, a hacker, a hitter, a grifter, and, eventually, a family. Also, revenge.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Jonathan Sims/Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims/Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Tim Stoker
Series: we change together (the TMA Leverage AU) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2139042
Comments: 167
Kudos: 365





	1. Approach

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, a few things about this Leverage AU that will come out eventually in the story but are also helpful for general context: 
> 
> -Entities exist, rituals don’t. So, the Entities and their avatars are still jockeying against each other for power, but it’s in-universe power and not world-ending power  
> -Everything else about the Institute is the same except for that it works more aggressively in tandem with Section 31 to track and contain people who use their entity-related powers for crime. This is Elias’ thinly-veiled attempt to police other Entities and gain power for himself.  
> -Only Jon, Sasha and Basira ever worked for the Institute. Basira and Daisy are still former Section 31 cops/partners.

Jon was trying to nurse a watered-down old fashioned alone at his hotel bar for an hour before he noticed that someone was helping him along. Namely, the other noisy customers of the bar abruptly disappeared, leaving Jon alone with a terrified-looking bartender.

Jon grimaced down at his cocktail. “Mr. Lukas, I presume.”

A large, pale man ambled towards Jon, dressed in a suit and a battered navy peacoat. “Hello Jon,” he said pleasantly. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” He looked over at the bartender, who was still searching around the suddenly empty room with hysterical alarm. “A White Russian, please,” he instructed. The bartender looked at him and over to Jon in confusion.

“On the rocks,” the man specified. The bartender flinched and moved towards the liquor rack.

“Peter Lukas, to be precise,” the man said, offering his hand to shake. When Jon didn’t take him up on it, he shrugged and sidled onto a stool two down from Jon’s. “I’m guessing you know my family as patrons of the Institute.”

“I don’t work for the Institute anymore,” Jon said, not looking up from his drink. “I haven’t for a year.”

“Oh, I know. Your departure caused a stir, even for those of us who aren’t linked to the gossip web as much as others.” Peter said conversationally, ignoring Jon’s clenched jaw. “How many Entity-marked criminals did you track down while you were there? I know that Section 31 owes you a great debt. They wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near Maxwell Rayner without your help. And Jane Prentiss— that was a nasty case.”

The bartender returned, handing Peter his cocktail with shaking hands. Peter accepted it without looking at him.“All that work for the Institute, and it still didn’t keep them from feeding your assistant to the Stranger,” he continued mildly, shaking his head. “Terrible business.”

“What do you want, Mr. Lukas?” Jon asked sharply, letting the faint static that accompanied a compulsion ring through the abandoned bar.

“ _I want you to get something for me_ ,” Peter said instantly, blinking and shaking himself a little. “My, that’s unpleasant. But true, obviously. I’ve had an artifact stolen from my family’s vault. A book, a Leitner. _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_ , by John Ruskin. Reading it allows one to—”

“—I know what it does,” Jon interrupted.

“I thought you might. The thief is a man named Mikaele Salesa. He’s a black market dealer in supernatural artifacts.”

Jon sighed. “So you want me to find the book.”

Peter laughed. “Oh no. I know where it is. I want you to steal it back.”

Jon looked up from his Old Fashioned. “I’m not a thief,” he protested.

“I have thieves. What I need is an honest man to watch them,” Peter said, smiling benignly. “It seems like you’re still in the watching business.” He drew out a folder from his briefcase and slid it down the bar to Jon, who reached for it and missed. He had to lean awkwardly over the bar to rescue the file from where it was half-leaning on bottles of liquor.

“I have a family meeting in a week,” Peter added. “I’d prefer not to have to tell them about this particular loss. My family isn’t known for their understanding nature. You can take a look at the people I’ve already hired, if you’re concerned that I’m not serious.”

Jon flipped open the folder and raised his eyebrows. “Daisy? You have Daisy Tonner?”

“Why, is there somebody better?”

“No,” Jon replied distantly, scanning the sheet, “but she once tried to garrote me with a string of holiday lights.” He kept reading, shuffling through the other two pieces of paper behind the first. “I’ve tracked down all three in my work at the Institute. Well, Tim Stoker was Sasha’s case, but we’ve— we’ve met. All of them work alone. They definitely won’t work for _you_.”

“Oh, they will,” Peter said easily. “For three hundred thousand pounds each, they will. I realize that my family doesn’t have the best reputation, but what we lack in goodwill we certainly make up for in moveable assets. For you, it’s double. And, of course, an additional bonus.”

Jon snorted. “I’m not interested in your money.”

“Oh, I didn’t say that the bonus was monetary. Based on my research, Salesa plans to sell the Leitner to the Magnus Institute. I can only imagine how valuable a book like that would be to those who serve the Ceaseless Watcher.” Peter stirred his drink idly, poking at the ice cubes with a straw. “So the question is, Mr. Sims: how badly do you want to screw over Elias Bouchard?”

Jon stared at him intently in silence for several moments. “Tell me your plan.”

* * *

Twenty-four hours later, Jon was sitting in a hulking SUV with tinted windows, scowling at a sleek black monitor that was currently displaying the detailed blueprints of a fifteen-story warehouse.“Melanie, I don’t even know what buttons to press on this thing.”

“You don’t press any buttons. It’s voice-activated, Sims,” Melanie King said from several blocks away, standing on the roof of the same warehouse. “I know you’d prefer to communicate with carrier pigeons, but this is how we talk in the twenty-first century.”

Jon awkwardly adjusted the small dark communication device in his ear. “Very well. No surprises.”

“I’ve been hacking into systems like this since I was in college,” Melanie snapped. “I don’t need you questioning my competence.”

“Well, you also once got shot by a ghost,” Jon snapped back. “Pardon my concern.”

On the warehouse rooftop, a tall man in a catsuit and a black skullcap raised his head from where he was securing a series of wires to a steel beam. “Melanie,” he said gleefully. “Melanie, how did you get _shot by a ghost_?”

“Fuck off, Tim,” Melanie said, hunched over a laptop screen that glowed brightly in the dark.

“Melanie, I need to know.”

“Tim, once you go through that window, I am the only thing standing between you and about eight different alarm systems,” Melanie said tightly, still focused on her screen. “Do you really want to try me right now?”

“That’s the other thing,” Tim continued, unfazed. “Aren’t avatars of the Slaughter usually . . .” he trailed off, making a stabby motion and the screeching noises from _Psycho_. “Like, literal hackers?”

“Play your cards right, and you’ll find out,” Melanie spat.

Daisy Tonner, who was standing behind the bickering duo and pulling on an identical black skullcap over her hair, sighed. “This is exactly why I work alone,” she grumbled to Jon through their earpieces.

Melanie snorted. “I don’t even know what it is you do.”

Jon winced. He had first encountered Daisy Tonner after she’d had a disagreement with two other Hunters in a Ukrainian restaurant near Clapham. The Institute was called in to help identify the two other Hunters by their dental records. Jon had, at one point, spent several days gagged in the trunk of her car as Daisy settled a territory dispute between two branches of the Russian mob and decided whether or not she wanted to kill him.

“All of you, listen,” Jon announced insistently. “We’re going on my count, not a second sooner. Tim, no freelancing.”

“Aw, he doesn’t want to be our pal,” Tim said playfully, adjusting his harness along his torso. “You know, boss, the last time I used this rig was in Paris, 2015.”

Jon paused. “Wait, _Ex Altiora_? You stole that?”

“Sasha said that I deserved to keep it for a heist that beautiful,” Tim said, grinning.

“Still, on my count,” Jon said. “Five, four, three— “

Daisy and Melanie looked over as Tim streaked past them, diving off the roof with a gleeful shout.

“Is it true that he blew up a circus?” Melanie asked.

“Yes,” Jon said tiredly.

Tim fell headfirst down the side of the building with the grace of an Olympic diver, stopping seven stories up in front of a plate-glass window. He pulled a tiny blowtorch the size of a lighter out of his back pocket and held it to the window, cutting a circular hole in the glass just large enough to wiggle through. With his other hand, he reached back into his other pocket to pull out a small round suction device that he attached to the glass cutout. “Does this thing remind anyone of a pop socket?” He asked idly while affixing the suction device to the glass. “But for crime. Crime socket!”

“Concentrate, Tim,” Jon said.

“He doesn’t know what a pop socket is,” Melanie added.

“ _I know what a pop socket is_ ,” Jon hissed. “Can we all maintain a _semblance_ of professionalism?”

Tim grinned and gently pulled the glass cutout out of the building wall, letting it drop and shatter onto the empty pavement below. He rocked slightly backward and then dove through the opening, arching his spine to avoid touching the sides of the hole and rolling onto the large wooden desk that stood inside the dingy room. He worked at the front of his harness to release himself from the wires that trailed through the window.

“I’m in,” he said quietly through the comms.“Give me one minute.” Tim dashed across the office, through the door, and down the hallway, until he was turning the knob on a closet door that opened into a floor-to-ceiling panel of electrical wires. He looked around quizzically before hot-wiring a collection labeled ROOF on the far left corner. He plugged in a tablet that immediately displayed the security feed of every camera of the building. “Nice, Melanie,” he said. ’Setup is complete.”

Okay, we’re moving,” Daisy said, as she threw open the fire escape hatch on the top of the warehouse roof and gestured to Melanie to follow her down it. The two jumped down onto a fire escape ladder that led down onto the backstairs corridor of the building.

“There’s an opening to the west elevator shaft in a hundred and fifty feet,” Jon said. “Tim is sending the elevator up to you now.”

Tim stared at the electrical panel in from of him “Yep, here we go,” he said. “Shaft door is open, the elevator is coming up. Neither of you have seen the beginning of _Mission: Impossible_ , right?”

“I could rip out your spine with my teeth,” Daisy said tonelessly.

“Kidding, kidding,” Tim said. “Jump on in, I promise your safety.”

Both women sat on the floor in front of the open shaft and jumped down to the top of the elevator car, riding it down to the third floor where the vault was located.

“What about security,” Jon asked tensely. “Tim, do you see security?”

Tim checked in on his tablet. “They don’t see a thing.”

Melanie and Daisy rode the elevator car down to the fourth floor, waiting until Tim paused it to wrangle through the security opening. “Okay, we’re in,” Daisy reported. “We see the vault.”

Mikaele Salesa generally wasn’t known for his security measures; he had a crew loyal to his money and tended to transport objects cursed enough that casual thieves knew not to take a chance. There were many urban legends about those who had taken a chance with Salesa’s merchandise. However, for the objects that tempted the Peter Lukas’ of the world, Salesa took precautionary measures. His seemingly-haphazard warehouse also contained a state-of-the-art vault on the fourth floor, steel-lined and equipped with the finest digital lock that money could buy.

“Ten digit password,” Melanie said. “Well, I appreciate Salesa making this interesting.” She plugged a fancy-looking cube into the door lock and started pressing buttons intently.

“Um, boss,” Tim said suddenly. “We have a problem. There’s a group of guards doing their rounds early. An hour early— why the hell would they do that?”

Jon paused, and his eyes unfocused briefly. “Our cover isn’t blown. There’s a Chelsea game tonight. They’re trying to finish before the second half. Melanie, can you hurry up?”

“I’m a hacker, not a wizard,” Melanie hissed. “How far away are they?”

“They’re coming down the hall,” Tim warned. “Unless you can hack it in the next ninety seconds, they’re going to collide with you.”

“Daisy,” Jon said through the comms. “Clear the room. Use Melanie as bait.”

“ _Bait_?” said Melanie, still working on the door lock. “What the hell Sims, I am not _bait._ ”

Daisy ignored her and turned, leaving Melanie and striding in the other direction out of sight.

“Damn it,” Melanie spat, still furiously punching buttons on her device even as the last digit settled. She grabbed the door handle just as a burly security guard barred into the room.

“Hold it right there,” he barked, holding up a gun. Five other guards flanked in behind him.

Melanie obediently put her hands up, just as Daisy appeared, unseen, behind the men. She grinned, and Melanie swore that she could see her teeth suddenly get longer, dropping down her jaw in an unnatural shape as she lept at the guards at the flank, tearing their guns out of their hands as she slashed at the backs of their knees with suddenly sharpened fingernails. The final guard turned and saw the carnage of his colleagues just in time for Daisy to suplex him against the concrete floor, knocking him unconscious.

“ _That’s_ what I do,” Daisy said shortly, standing up and cracking her neck.

“Yep. Okay,” Melanie said shrilly, picking her duffel bag back up.

“Nicely done, Daisy,” Jon said. “Thank you for not severing any major arteries.”

Daisy grinned, her smile still sharper than a normal human’s. “I remembered how squeamish you get about things like that.”

“We get it, you’re best pals,” Melanie said, stepping gingerly over the unconscious bodies of the guards. “Let’s go get this Leitner.”

The door to the storage room had been opened successfully by Melanie’s lock breaker; as she turned the handle, Melanie and Daisy crept into a tall, narrow closet covered in floor-to-ceiling vaults. “Okay,” Melanie said, turning on a portable scanning device. “So this is going to tell us the size of all the objects in this vault. Should be able to point us toward a Leitner.”

Melanie started scanning around the storage room, stepping around the bodies of the security guards that Daisy dragged in, pausing occasionally to wrap strips of their uniforms around the more serious injuries. “Okay, problem,” she said. “There are two objects in here that look like Leitners. Book sized.”

“Can’t you just break into both of them?” Daisy asked, pausing mid-drag.

“Obviously I can, but we don’t have that kind of time,” Melanie said impatiently.

“Tell me the coordinates of the two books,” Jon commanded.

“Um, they’re both around seven and a half by ten inches,” Melanie said, squinting at the device. “One is two inches thick, the other is half that.”

“It’s the first one,” Jon said confidently.

“Okay,” Melanie said, “Your call.” She moved over to a vault on the left wall and pulled out a pair of lock picks. “Salesa went old school on these,” she said, starting to pick the locks. “Daisy, you about done?”

“Almost,” Daisy said, dragging another body into the vault.

Several minutes passed as the comms were filled with the faint scraping sounds of Melanie’s tools. Finally, Melanie made a quiet cheer and carefully opened the vault door. “Hello gorgeous,” she said, pulling out a worn leather-bound book and stuffing it in a black canvas duffel. “Leitner is secured.”

“Guys, I have bad news,” Tim said grimly, bent over the panels in his storage closet. “Salesa’s guards— the ones that Daisy pummeled— they reset the alarms on the roof before they came to grab you. We can’t go up.”

“Alright,” Daisy said grimly. “So, everyone for themselves then.”

“Go ahead,” Melanie said. “I’m the one with the Leitner.”

“Well, I’m the one with an exit.” Tim snapped

Jon sighed. ”Would all of you please listen to me? We’re going to improvise.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Daisy said, snorting. “We’re all gonna die.”

“None of you are going to die,” Jon said firmly. “Get to the elevator and head down. Meet on the fifth floor. It’s important that you’re all in the same room.”

Daisy and Melanie looked at each other, clearly warring with the desire to cut and run, before running towards the elevators. Daisy kicked the door of the vault closed behind them, locking the unconscious guards inside.

After a tense elevator ride, the doors dinged open on the fifth floor, revealing Tim in his catsuit, scowling and leaning on the wall. “If this doesn’t work,” he warned. “I’m rapelling out of the nearest window.”

“Find a room,” Jon instructed.

“Find a room?” Melanie echoed. “It doesn’t matter which one?”

“A door that closes would be ideal.”

Melanie growled and strode towards what looked like another utility closet, gesturing for Daisy and Tim to come inside before locking the door. “Okay, what now?”

Jon took a deep breath. “Open the Leitner.”

“Are you insane?” Melanie hissed, clutching the duffel to her chest. “These books _eat people_.”

“Not this one,” Jon said confidently. “I’ve read about it. And—I have a hunch. Tim, you do it. You’ve got the strongest connection to the Eye.”

Melanie passed the book over to Tim, who held it like a live tarantula. “You better be sure about this hunch, boss If this book melts my face off, I am going to come back as an incredibly pissed off ghost to haunt you.”

“That’s fair. Open it to Chapter Five, Tim. _The Lamp of Power._ ”

Even though the comms, Jon’s voice seemed to pull a response from the book. As Tim cracked it open, the text shimmered and shifted, slightly, like the ink of the text was still fluid liquid. Tim thumbed through the pages, pausing at the title page of Chapter Two. A pen and ink illustration of an elaborately decorated stone archway marked the opposite page, each portion of the structure anatomized.

“It’s an Equilateral arch,” Jon said softly through the comms, looking down at the book through his teammate's body cameras. “Geometric gothic.”

There was a faint sound of voices yelling, harsh and strident, down the hallway, back by the elevators. “It’s very striking,” Daisy said. “But how is it going to get us out of here?”

“Start reading, Tim,” Jon commanded. “And I want you to think of a staircase. A new one.”

Tim took a deep breath and started to read. “ _The traveler who desires to correct the errors of his judgment, necessitated by the inequalities of temper, infelicities of circumstance, and accidents of association, has no other resource than to wait for the calm verdict of interposing year; and to watch for the new arrangements of eminence and shape in the images which remain latest in his memory; as in the ebbing of a mountain lake_ — is this sentence ever going to end?”

“Keep reading,” Jon commanded, his voice taking on the gravelly power of compulsion.

Tim sighed. “ _As in the ebbing of a mountain lake, he would watch the varying outlines of its successive shore, and trace, in the form of its departing waters, the true direction of the forces which had cleft, or the currents which had excavated, the deepest recesses of its primal bed_.”

As he spoke, the voices in the corridor got quieter, muffled by the smooth wall that rippled behind them, sealing off. When Tim said “the form of its departing waters,” a whirlpool emerged in the floor, spinning around before solidifying as a highly ornate spiral staircase.

“Down you get,” Jon said, satisfied.

“Now that,” Daisy said, patting the book, “is an impressive party trick, Sims.”

“It kind of feels like cheating though,” Tim confessed quietly, as they hurried down the tight curves of the staircase. “Professionally speaking.”

Jon turned on the engine of his car, guiding it out of its position on a dark street and driving towards Salesa’s warehouse. “Far be it from me to cheapen your honored techniques of seducing cops, Tim” he adds into the comms, still grinning with the thrill of a problem well-solved. “Let me know when you’re out of the warehouse.”

* * *

Because of a combination of post-heist euphoria and deep professional paranoia, they all went to the drop off point, handing the Leitner in its inconspicuous duffle to another pale and disdainful-looking Lukas, who took it and abruptly disappeared. The four were left standing in a dark and empty waterside walkway in Canary Wharf, looking at a faint collection of fog.

“God, that’s weird,” Daisy said.

Jon made a face in agreement. “Well, I suppose that’s . . . it then,” he added tentatively. “The money will be in your accounts tomorrow.”

Tim looked at the other three, standing in a loose circle under the lights of a streetlamp. “Did anyone else notice how _good_ we were?” He asked tentatively. “I mean, I’m good, I’m always good, but we were rocking it.”

Daisy rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well. One show only. No encores.”

“I’ve already forgotten your names,” Melanie said wryly, turning to leave.

Tim stole a sideways glance at Jon. “Well, it was nice,” he added insistently. “Being on the same side for once.”

Jon scowled. “We are not on the same side.”

“You are now!” Melanie called from down the street.

Tim grinned. “Come on boss, tell the truth. Did you have a little bit of fun playing the black king, instead of the white knight? Just this once?”

Jon gave in and smiled at Tim. “It was good to see you, Tim,” he admitted. “Take care of yourself.”

“I always do!” Tim said, which Jon didn’t need Beholding powers to know was a lie. Tim shot him finger-guns as he turned to leave.

That left Daisy and Jon standing on the dark walkway.

“You did good,” Daisy said, punching him lightly in the shoulder. “This was much less of a tire fire than I thought it was going to be.”

“Thank you, Daisy,” Jon said. “Maybe give me a running start next time you see me.”

Daisy grinned. “Oh, that’ll do fuck-all. You’re very slow.” She hesitated. “Have you seen Basira lately?”

“No,” Jon said, grimacing. “I’m not really on speaking terms with anyone from the Institute.”

“Yeah,” Daisy said quietly.

“You might have better luck with Melanie, actually,” Jon said, turning to look at the departing back of their hacker. “I was in charge of her case at the Institute, but she always liked Basira better.”

Daisy followed his gaze. “Well, we’re unlikely to cross paths again. Probably for the better. She’s prickly.”

Jon stared meaningfully at Daisy until she laughed.

* * *

Jon didn’t sleep well anymore, as a rule. While he’d been able to leave the Institute without permanent physical damage, the inability to read statements kept him constantly on the edge of gnawing hunger while also lessening his need for more human forms of sustenance like food and sleep. In the long run, this was probably a blessing in disguise, since he hadn’t drawn a steady paycheck for months and was limping by on the meager remains of his inheritance.

For once, Jon had gone to bed buzzing with excitement rather than a sense of restlessness or existential dread; he couldn’t tell if it was the proximity to the _Seven Lamps of Architecture_ or the morally dubious but bracing sense of camaraderie that had buoyed his mind. He hadn’t felt like he was part of something since before he left the Institute; and even then, his memories of the easy and focused partnership that he and Basira and Sasha had shared was corrupted by— well, many things. Mostly Elias.

So after drifting into sleep in the early hours of the morning, Jon was awoken at 6:00 am to the shrill ringing of his cellphone. Jon haphazardly hit the buttons and held the phone to his face. “What?” He asked groggily.

After listening to the suddenly less soporific tones of Peter Lukas’ voice for about a moment, Jon sat up in bed, adrenaline clearing the exhausted haze in his mind. “That’s impossible,” he said. “I saw it get handed off personally.”

“Well, you didn’t,” Peter said petulantly. “Because the book that I’m holding is next to useless.”

“Okay,” Jon said, rubbing his temples, “Okay. I’ll come meet you. This is what happens when you hire thieves.”

“Thieves that you were supposed to be _watching_ ,” Peter added. “My family owns an aircraft hanger out near the City Airport. I’ll send you the address. Be there in an hour”

Jon took an Uber to the hangar, which was foolish and more than he could afford besides, but the only way that he could fight through the lingering exhaustion and confusion enough to stumble out of a car and towards the hangar at the appointed time.

“Sure this is where you’re meant to be, mate?” The Uber driver called in concern out the window.

“Yes,” Jon said, waving a hand at him as he walked forward. “I’m fine, thanks.”

There was a single door opened to the hanger that Jon stepped through carefully. He had assumed that it was going to be full of recently-updated aircraft and minimalist industrial designs, but the warehouse was dark, dusty and empty. As Jon continued onward, he caught the echo of raised voices farther inward. Disturbingly familiar raised voices.

As Jon continued at a quicker pace into the center of the hangar, he sat that Melanie was gesturing aggressively with a long and wicked-looking knife at Daisy, who was looking down at her, nonplussed.

“Stop,” Jon commanded, walking into the hangar. “Melanie, put the knife down.”

“Are you compelling me?” Melanie asked furiously, even as she stowed the knife in her back pocket. “You asshole.”

“ _What’s going on here_?” Jon asked, not even bothering to pretend otherwise.

“The money isn’t in my account,” Daisy said immediately. “Melanie’s the last one who handled the duffle.”

“I’m a hacker, not a thief!” Melanie shouted. “Where’s Tim?”

“Tim’s right here,” Tim said, stalking into the hangar while cocking and pointing a handgun. “I don’t have the fucking Leitner.”

“Your safety is still on,” Daisy said without looking over at him.

Tim scoffed. “Like I’m going to fall for that!”

Jon glanced over at him. “Actually she’s right, it’s still on,”

Tim held his gun to the side for a moment and Daisy grabbed and twisted it in his grip, expelling the magazine and throwing the body over her shoulder. “Amateur hour,” she grumbled.

“I don’t understand,” Jon said, looking from one to the other. “Did you come here to get paid?”

“Of course not!” Melanie scoffed. “You think I show up in person to get paid?”

“This is supposed to be a walk-away,” Daisy growled. “I’m never supposed to see any of you ever again.”

“So, you’re all here because you didn’t get paid,” Jon said slowly. “And you’re angry.”

“Top notch deduction there, boss,” Tim said tightly.

“In fact, the only way to get us all in the same place at the same time is to tell us—” Jon paused. “Oh. To tell us that we’re not getting paid.”

All four looked at each other in dawning horror for a moment before dashing towards the exit. Melanie tripped on the stairs and Daisy doubled back to pick her up by her shirt collar, throwing her through the open hangar doors.

Jon paused at the doorway to hit the closing mechanism on the hangar door, holding down the button so that the metal panels of the door began shifting downward.

“What are you doing?” Tim shouted, turning. “Jon, fucking move!”

Jon opened his mouth to explain the physics of an explosion like the one that they were undoubtedly about to experience; namely, that their chances of survival were doubled if not standing in front of the sole opening of an otherwise closed metal container.

Unfortunately, Jon’s explanation was interrupted by that explosion.

* * *

Jon work abruptly for the second time that day, this time handcuffed to a hospital bed under harsh industrial strip lighting. His head was pounding in the hot-lavalike way that signaled a possible concussion, and his mouth felt like it was full of sawdust.

“It’s about time,” Melanie said to his right, and Jon turned to see her lying on a bed next to his. Tim was pacing back and forth across the room, fuming, his handcuffs already hanging loose on one wrist. Any remnants of his cavalier energy from the previous night were gone, replaced with a coiled, resentful fury.

“Where are we?” Jon asked hoarsely.

“Barking Hospital,” Melanie answered. “The local cops arrived just as we were coming to.”

Jon nodded, flinching as a series of announcements and codes were broadcast over their room’s intercom and several gurney rushed by outside their door.

“Don’t like hospitals?” Daisy asked shortly. She was sitting upright in an armchair near Jon’s bed, handcuffed to the radiator. There was a small butterfly bandage over a cut on her temple, but she seemed otherwise unhurt.

“Bad memories,” Jon admitted. “There was a stint a few years back where I got kidnapped roughly once a week.”

Daisy grinned. “Oh, I remember.”

“Is everyone okay?” Jon pressed, wincing as he sat up in his bed and looking around at the others. ”Is anyone hurt?”

“You got the worst of it,” Daisy said. “Luckily, Lukas is not good at rigging a hangar with C4. Cops have already run our prints, though, so we’re screwed.”

Jon looked down at the black smudges on his fingerprints and sighed. “Damn. Okay, how long ago was that?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes,” Tim said tightly. “They’re sending them through the Met database now.”

Melanie grimaced. “Depending on the software, they’ll get a call back in around thirty-five minutes. We’ve got maybe twenty to get out of here, or we’re all going to jail. What I don’t get,” she started in furiously, “is how Lukas managed to double-cross you. Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of mind reader? How did you not know?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Jon said defensively. “I get bits and pieces of things.”

“Then what good are you?”

“Stop it, Melanie,” Daisy said, standing up from her chair to crane her neck towards their hospital room door. “I can take these cops,” she said to Jon quietly.

“Do not kill anyone,” Tim hissed. “You’ll screw up my exit plan.”

“What, you’re going to run an exit plan while the rest of us are still handcuffed to our beds?” Melanie asked incredulously.

Tim shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much.”

“Tim, no,” Jon said. “Look, you each know what you can do, but I know what you _all_ can do. Together, we all have a better chance.”

Tim snorted. “You think I trust those two?”

Jon stared at him. “Do you trust _me_?” he asked, accidentally letting a bit of compulsion leak through. Tim looked back at him, his eyes still red from the smoke of the explosion. Two weeks after Sasha’s death, Jon had dragged Tim bodily out of a wax museum that the thief had lined with enough C4 to kill all the avatars of the Stranger that were inside. Basira figured out how to trip the explosion with a remote detonator, but it was a near miss. Tim had punched him in the face. They hadn’t spoken for a year.

Daisy beat Tim to it. “Of course we trust you,” she said ruefully. “You’re an honest man.” Tim and Melanie both reluctantly nodded.

Jon took a deep breath. “Okay. The cops outside are expecting a call from the Met, right? So we give them a call. Tim, I need you to get me a phone. Two phones, if possible.”

Tim was still slumped angrily against the wall, but sighed and stood up. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, walking over towards the door. “This is going to suck.” He stuck three fingers down his throat and promptly vomited all over the floor.

Daisy caught on immediately. “Can we get a doctor in here?” She called. “This guy is really sick!”

Five minutes later a stern young doctor was leaning over the hospital bed where Tim was sprawled attractively. “Extreme nausea can be a sign of a concussion,” she said, shining a light into Tim’s eyes. “If you feel any other effects, especially blurred vision, tell the policeman right away.” Three other nurses of various ages and genders stood clustered behind the doctor, either curious about the hospital’s room full of criminals or blatantly staring at Tim.

The doctor tapped on Tim’s handcuffs, which were reattached to the hospital bed. “Try and keep these on this time,” she said wryly as she turned to go. Tim managed a responding grin while still looking appropriately meek and ill. As soon as the medical personnel and their police escort left the room, Tim pulled a smartphone from underneath his leg. Melanie, who was lying in the bed next to his, held up one as well.

“What?” She said, in response to Tim’s surprised look. “You’re not the only one who knows how to pickpocket.”

“Melanie, you know what to do,” Jon said. “Tim, give me your phone.”

Tim released himself from his handcuffs in a number of seconds and threw the phone to Jon in an exaggerated underhand. Jon still failed to catch it, and glared at Daisy when she chuckled.

Jon looked into the hallway and stared blankly into the distance, his eyes unfocusing, before dialing a number and throwing the phone to Daisy, who caught it one-handed and held it to her ear. “Our supervising officer is named Archie Murdock,” he said.

Daisy nodded, just as they heard a nurse walk up outside their door. “Officer? You have an outside call.” They waited to hear the steps of the cop walk away from their door.

Daisy cleared her throat. “Hi yes, PC Murdock? This is Detective Sergeant Husselback of the London Branch. We just got those prints that you sent us, they’re sending up some serious red flags. I’ve got someone on the line with Interpol, can you hold?”

“Yes ma’am,” Murdock said, suddenly alert.

Daisy tossed the phone back to Jon, who looked over at Melanie, who had just finished taking a headshot of herself and was typing quickly on the smartphone. She nodded at Jon.

“Hello, this is Chief Superintendent Smilton of Interpol,” Jon began, making his accent even more exaggerated than usual. “Is our agent all right?”

“I’m — sorry?” Murdock said. “I don’t follow.”

“Constable, listen to me,” Jon said intently. “The woman that you’re currently guarding under the name of Melanie King is one of our agents. She’s been in deep cover for three years. You should be receiving an email at any moment with her official Interpol ID confirming what I’ve told you.”

Melanie shot Jon a thumbs up, just as Thorburn fumbled with this cell phone down at the nurse's station to open his email. “Um, yeah,” Murdock said. “I see it. Wow.”

“All of this information is heavily classified,” Jon said severely. “I need to know that I can trust you.”

“Yes sir,” Murdock said eagerly. “You can trust me, sir!”

Ten minutes later, Constable Murdock and his bewildered-looking partner were watching in awe as Melanie loaded her handcuffed teammates into a borrowed Daganham PD car.

“Thank you, gentleman,” Melanie drawled, turning back towards Constable Murdock and his partner and saluting them. “It’s, um, been an honor.”

“Please tell me,” Jon said as Melanie quickly buckled herself into the driver’s seat. “That you didn’t _salute_ them.”

“I’m a hacker, not an actress” Melanie hissed, gunning the engine of the police car and pealing out of the hospital driveway.

* * *

As the designated (and non-handcuffed) driver, Melanie got to choose their safe house, which turned out to be an open concept flat on the South Bank with a private elevator and floor-to-ceiling views of the Thames.

‘This is . . . . nice,” Jon said, walking towards the windows in appreciation.

Melanie grinned. “The perks of living on the shadier side of the law, Sims,” she said, tossing Daisy a soda from the wet bar and zoning in on an impressive media console installed in the living room.

Tim gestured indignantly at her. “What, so the rest of us don’t get drinks?”

“Reserved only for people who saved my life,” Melanie said absently, booting up her computers. “And there are too many breakable things in this room for me to throw Jon a soda.”

Daisy shrugged. “Seems fair.”

The next two hours were consumed in research and copious amounts of takeaway; namely, Melanie did research while tasking the other three with finding a good Thai place that would agree to a no-contact delivery paid through cash.

“Okay, so Lukas’ story was ninety percent true,” Melanie said, scanning her computer furiously. “Salesa was planning on selling the Leitner to the Institute, but he didn’t steal it from Lukas; he got it from a verrrry shady source in Belgium.” She clicked through a few more pages. “Oh, you’ve got to be _kidding_ me.”

“What is it?” Jon asked, coming to stand behind her computer chair.

Melanie turned grimly. “Look,” she said. “We can follow this lead. I also have four tickets for each of us to Rome, New York, Sao Paulo, and Beijing. You should make you choice now if you want out.”

All three of them stared at her quietly. “Okay,” Melanie said, turning back towards her screen. “You did ask for it. I dug up a marriage certificate for Peter Lukas. Four marriage certificates actually, dated 2014, 2016, another one in 2016— that must have been a quick divorce— and 2018. All to the same man, one Elias Bouchard.”

Everyone froze. “Wait, Lukas is Elias’ husband?” Tim asked incredulously. “Someone _married_ Elias? Multiple times?”

“How did you not know that Elias was married?” Melanie asked, swiveling around in her chair to glare at Jon. “You worked for him for years!”

“Well, I didn’t know he was evil either, did I?” Jon replied testily.

“Ugh, so the Leitner we stole is going to be some sort of anniversary gift to Elias?” Tim asked.

Jon sighed wearily. “It’s more likely that organizing heists to steal each other’s property is their form of—flirting, for lack of a better term.”

“That’s worse,” Tim said. “How is that _worse_.”

“Lukas isn’t going to have eyes to read that book with once I’m done with him,” Daisy growled.

“I wouldn’t try,” Jon said grimly. “He could propel you into the Lonely before you got within hitting distance.”

“I’m fast,” Daisy said predatorily. “I’ll take my chances. He tried to _kill_ us.”

Melanie nodded. “And more importantly, he didn’t pay us.”

Daisy stared at her. “How is that _more important?"_

Melanie shrugged. “I’m a freelancer. I take that personally.”

“Both of you are right,” Jon said. “But if we’re going to do something, we should do it together.”

“You want to run a con on Peter Lukas?” Tim asked, raising his eyebrows. “ _You_?”

“Why is that so surprising?” Jon asked defensively. “I tracked you all for years! How do you think that I caught so many entity-touched criminals?”

“Luck,” Melanie said, just as Tim said “Sasha,” simultaneously.

Jon ignored them. “Look Peter Lukas is rich, and he’s powerful, but he’s overconfident and uncreative. He’s the best kind of mark.”

Daisy frowned. “What’s in it for me?”

“Revenge,” Jon said honestly. “And if it goes right, a lot of money.”

“What’s in it for me?” Melanie asked.

“A lot of money,” Jon said. “And if it goes right, revenge.”

Melanie tilted her head in acknowledgment and grinned. “So what’s in it for you?”

Jon’s face went cold and intent. It was easy to remember Jon as a stuffy librarian type that wore ugly cardigans and hated violence. People often forgot that he was genuinely terrifying when threatened with the right stakes. “He used Sasha,” he said, looking over at Tim. “Lukas used Sasha to get me to accept the job.”

Tim nodded and turned towards the window, clenching his jaw. “Let’s take him out.”

“It’s not going to be that easy,” Melanie said as she started to pace restlessly. “He knows all of our faces. He’d see us coming a mile away.”

“I know. I know,” Jon said, rubbing his face. “We need someone who Peter Lukas doesn’t know.”

Tim suddenly turned away from the window and smiled delightedly at Jon. Jon instinctively frowned suspiciously. “What we need,” Tim said, picking up one of Melanie’s funko pops and spinning it in his hands as he walked towards them in the room. “Is a grifter.”

Jon paused for a moment before flushing.“No,” he snapped. “Tim, absolutely not.”

“Oh come on, boss, you know he’s the best option.”

“He is _not_.”

Melanie looked back and forth at them. “What am I missing? What’s going on?”

“Not ten miles from here,” Tim announced, “lives the best con man in England.”

Daisy raised one eyebrow. “ Is he with the Web?”

“Oh yes,” Tim promised. “And, even better, he _hates_ Elias.”

“Tim, I said no.”

“Jon is prejudiced,” Tim declared. “Because he got conned by him a few years ago. Sasha told me all about it.”

“He didn’t _con_ me,” Jon hissed. “He stole a dog from the Institute. We were just keeping it for observation, in case it turned out to be marked by the Hunt.”

“Aww,” Melanie said, smiling. “That’s kind of cute.”

“We’re not getting Martin,” Jon insisted. “He’s unprofessional, and he thinks he’s some sort of born-again Robin Hood, for god’s sake. I am still the head of this team, and my word is final.”

* * *

Two hours later, the four sat in the back of a sparsely-populated coffeehouse that had been haphazardly converted into a poetry reading. Martin, a large man with unruly curly hair, stood under a spotlight, clutching several sheets of printer paper in a tight and slightly shaking fist. “Down, down, down into the darkness of the pavement,” he read nervously. “Gently it goes - the besotted, the humid, the clammy.” Once it was clear that that was the end of the poem, there were a few weak claps.

“Nice!” Tim shouted.

“It’s not a football match, Tim,” Jon said, slinking down in his seat. “You can’t just _yell_ at people.”

“Tim shrugged. “Hey, I like showing appreciation.”

Martin looked up, bewildered and squinting against the glare of the spotlight. “Um, thanks, I guess?” He said. “This next one is called ‘Requiem for a Tuesday.’”

“You were conned by this man?” Melanie asked quietly. “ _This_ man?”

“Shut up, Melanie,” Jon hissed.

After the reading, they lingered near the back door of the coffeehouse as people slowly trickled out, until Martin was the only one left, dutifully stacking the chairs on tables.

“That was great!” Tim exclaimed, approaching him. “I liked the bit about the trees.”

Martin smiled ruefully. “You may be my only fan, Tim.”

Jon rolled his eyes from where he stood behind Tim. “Yes, that’s entirely possible.”

Martin blushed. “Oh, hi Jon.” He looked between Jon and Daisy and Melanie; the two women were still eyeing him warily. “Is this an Institute thing? I’ve gone straight, I promise.”

“No you haven’t,” Jon said disdainfully. “But unfortunately, that’s a good thing for us.”

“Yeah, no one here is going straight, if you get what I mean,” Melanie said. She and Tim high-fived.

“I am . . . still very confused,” Martin said, shifting on his feet. “Are you— Jon, are you saying that you’re a criminal now?”

Jon sighed. “For all intents and purposes, yes. It’s temporary.”

“Oh,” Martin said, his eyes wide. “Wow. Well, welcome to the dark side, I guess. I always . . . knew you had it in you?”

Jon managed something that had the potential to become a smile. “Yes, thank you for the vote of confidence. We actually have need of your services.”

Martin was still looking from person to person in confusion. “Are you lot some type of crew?” He asked. ”Hold on— Jon, didn’t Daisy try to kill you once?”

Daisy shrugged. “Didn’t take.”

“He keeps tabs on you,” Melanie said, thumping Jon on the shoulder. “That’s sweet.”

Martin blushed again. “I mean I— it makes sense to know where

“Look, are you in or are you out?” Daisy asked impatiently, folding her arms over her chest.

“I’m in!” Martin said quickly. “I’m in.”

“Alright all of you,” Jon said, turning back towards a sleek black SUV that Tim had effortlessly stolen four blocks from Melanie’s flat. “Let’s go break the law just once more.”

* * *

Melanie had done her best to convert her living room into a briefing room, complete with a large flatscreen monitor mounted to the wall. Jon had commandeered an armchair and was scribbling furiously into a black leather notebook. Tim was lying sideways on the couch, his head pillowed on Martin’s thigh and an enormous bowl of popcorn resting on his stomach. Daisy was pacing behind them; she claimed that she thought better on her feet.

Melanie sat cross-legged on top of the coffee table, surrounded by various gadgets. “Peter Lukas,” she said aloud, drawing up a picture of their mark on their monitor, captured while entering the Magnus Institute. “Member of the Lukas Family, and avatar of the Lonely. On again- off again husband of Elias Bouchard, manages the family endowment.Entitled prick.“

“Hear, hear,” Tim said through a mouthful of popcorn.

“Peter Lukas also likes to gamble,” Melanie added, drawing up records of various financial transactions. “Horses, blackjack, sports. He even bet on the name of the new royal baby.” She grimaced. “God, that’s pathetic. He picked _Peter_.”

“That’s our in,” Jon said, pointing with a pen.

Martin hummed. “What do you want to do, the Mississippi Stockbroker? Pigeon Drop?”

Jon rolled his eyes. “We’re not amateurs, Martin.”

Tim threw a piece of popcorn at him. Jon let it bounce off his head with a huff. “We’ll do the Kansas City Shuffle,” he announced.

“How’re you going to do the Kansas City Shuffle with a convincing Build-up?” Daisy asked, frowning. “Especially on Lukas? We can’t use the Institute as a front, Elias knows all of us.”

“Guys, I am a hacker, not a con artist,” Melanie said. “Stop using code.”

“What we need,” Martin explained earnestly, twisting to look at her over the couch, “is to make contact Peter through an organization that he’s not going to suspect. Like a Trojan Horse. But, you know, a business.”

Melanie’s hands raced over her laptop keyboard. “Okay, here’s a list of businesses that the Lukas’ are patrons of already.”

Jon squinted at the monitor on the wall. “Can you just— um— cancel out the ones that don’t have offices in London?”

Melanie hit a few keys. The list got much shorter.

Martin sat up sharply; Tim grumbled as his head got shoved sideways into the couch cushions. “That one,” Martin said, pointing. “The Hoffman Foundation. They’re based in Berlin, but they’ve got a satellite office in London. Fewer people, less oversight.”

Melanie pulled up the Hoffman Foundation homepage. “They’re a medical research nonprofit,” she said, “specializing in unusual or arcane conditions. Not the Lukas’ usual thing.”

“Yeah, but that’s just a front,” Martin explained. “They research the medical effects of entity-touched people and animals. I stole a cow from them once.”

Everyone in the room turned and stared at him. Martin blushed.

“What the hell was the cow for?” Melanie asked, baffled.

“It wasn’t for anything,” Martin said defensively. “I just— you know— I felt bad that they were experimenting on it! It was a good cow!”

“You _liberated_ a cow,” Daisy said slowly.

“I think that’s very sexy of him,” Tim said loyally. “A hero to all bovines!The patron saint offarm animals—”

“Shut up, Tim,” Martin said crisply.

Jon, despairing of any productive conversation until this line of questioning had finished, drifted over into Melanie’s kitchen to try and make a cup of tea.

Martin drifted in several minutes later, clutching the empty popcorn bowl that he had, according to the sounds coming from the living room, upended over Tim. “There’s a box of Tetley’s in the next drawer over,” he added. “I raided it earlier.”

Jon reluctantly shifted his attention over to the other drawer and tried not to think too hard about the fact that his former criminal case remembered what kind of tea he liked. “Let me know if Tim bothers you,” he said brusquely. “I know he can be . . . high spirited.”

“Oh, with all the flirting?” Martin said, shaking his head. “I know he’s just joking around. I checked in on him a few times last year after . .you know, when things were really bad. He seems better now.”

“Oh,” Jon said, surprised. “I didn’t know that you two knew each other. That was— that was nice of you, Martin.”

Martin shrugged. “We’ve crossed paths a few times. We had Sasha in common, and you, and I really do like to keep tabs. Weaving my web and all,” he said, wiggling his fingers like a spider and then wincing. “Listen I— I wanted to say how sorry I am about Sasha. When I heard about what Elias did— and what you had to do— I wish I could have been there.”

“I doubt that would have helped,” Jon said slowly, “as I would have additionally had to arrange for your arrest.”

Martin flushed. “Right. Well, hey, at least now you won’t have to worry about that, with your turn to crime. What are you going to do once we finish this job?”

Jon snorted derisively. “I don’t think I have a future as the head of a crime ring. Maybe I’ll go back into academia.”

“I was an academic for a few weeks once,” Martin mused, moving gently past Jon to take three more mugs down from the cupboard and rummage in the tea drawer. “It was— less contemplative than I thought it would be.”

“What were you stealing at a university?” Jon asked, turning to grab the shrieking kettle. “Was there a college mascot in need of saving?”

“I do steal other things besides animals, Jon,” Martin said hotly. “It was a first edition of Keats, actually.” He waved a mug at Jon. “Go ahead, make the joke.”

“— the mascot was probably a better mark,” Jon said all at once. It was disconcerting how much Martin seemed to know about him, as if they were lifelong friends rather than strangers who had met maybe a handful of times in direct conflict. Jon was used to having the upper hand in knowledge when it came to a relationship, whether he liked it or not. The Beholding never particularly helped Jon connect to people, not in the way that Martin could quietly pull and push someone when working a con, making them trust him or bored with him and always, always underestimate him.Jon knows things— he knew that Melanie loved Stargate SG1 because of an older cousin who used to babysit her after school, and that thing between Daisy and Basira that he _definitely_ wasn’t supposed to know about, and that Tim had never intended on walking out of that wax museum in Yarmouth. He’s constantly given puzzle pieces, their edges usually sharp with resentment, without any map of where to begin arranging them together.

Had he and Martin ever actually had a conversation about Keats? Jon strained to remember an interaction that wasn’t focused on Martin’s highly illegal tendencies towards identity theft. Most of the time Jon simply burst in on Martin’s latest scheme with several Sectioned officers. Martin always looked pleased to see him, oddly so, given that Jon’s appearance usually coincided with his own (temporary) incarceration.

“Hi, Jon,” he’d said ruefully in the middle of getting handcuffed while surrounded by alarmed employees of the Australian embassy. “It was the bill markings, wasn’t it? I should have known better than to try and forge Australian dollars on the first try.”

Jon had always assumed that Martin was constantly caught by the Institute because he wasn’t particularly smart, just coasting alone on Web-lent persuasiveness and a kind face. He’d never been concerned about Martin the way he was about Rayner or Jane Prentiss or even Daisy, in the earlier days. Martin didn’t seem interested in hurting anyone, apart from a mild and inexplicable tendency towards corporate pyromania. But that didn’t mean that they were _friends_.

Jon was so stuck combing through the past that he doesn’t realize that Martin has left the kitchen until he heard his voice contributing to a clamor in the living room and refocused

“Tim, no,” Martin was saying. “I suggested it as a joke, he’s going to _hate_ it—”

“Who cares?” Tim challenged sullenly. Jon wondered if Tim’s flirting was as idle as Martin seems to think it is.

“It’s honestly not terrible,” Melanie said thoughtfully. “And it’s an eldritch gambler’s dream. Lukas would be hooked.”

“What’s going on out here?” Jon asked.

Everyone looked at Martin, who hesitated. “I have an idea,” he said tentatively, “about what we could do with the Hoffman Foundation. But it’s just a draft—”

“Spit it out, Martin,” Jon said impatiently.

Martin huffed. “Fine, okay. Have you ever seen the movie _Fight Club_?”


	2. Build-Up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, thank you all so much for your response to the first chapter! I was so excited to see the level of enthusiasm for what I had assumed was an extremely niche crossover, and I’ve loved hearing about all of your history (or lack thereof!) with Leverage. 
> 
> Welcome to Part Two, also titled The Tim Stoker Chapter! I promise the last bit is going to be more ensemble-focused, I just got distracted. To all of the people thirsting after Grifter!Martin in Chapter One . . . this is going to be your jam. 
> 
> Content warnings for depression, Tim’s canon-typical suicidal ideation, and the old we-have-to-kiss-to-hide-our-faces-on-a-con trope, which might register as very light dubcon from Martin’s perspective

The next morning found them all standing in front of the industrial tower in Marylebone that housed the Hoffmann Institute London Office. It was a tall steel column with notched windows like chevrons that clashed with the stately Georgian brick buildings that flanked it on either side. Through the glass front of the lobby, Jon could see the impressive bulk of the security counter, screening in visitors, and giving directions. The Magnus Institute certainly never had anything like that; though to be fair, employee safety had never been at the top of Elias’ concerns.

Tim shifted his hold on the severalAmazon boxes in his grasp, a key prop in his costume as a delivery man. Martin smoothed down the lapels of his suit nervously, and Daisy pulled a gas mask out of her unmarked black duffel, checking the straps on the back before stowing it again. Melanie shifted her grip on the carrying case of her computer which also contained several knives that Jon has complained were of no practical use to the heist.A pedestrian exiting a coffeeshop side-eyed all them nervously as they passed on the sidewalk.

Jon sighed. “Alright,” he said with a confidence that he didn’t feel. “Let’s go steal an Institute.”

* * *

“Okay,” Melanie had said the previous evening, gesturing with a laser pointer at a 3-D scan of the tower and highlighting the fifteenth floor. “The Hoffman Institute has the full medical center at their Berlin headquarters, but only a small side laboratory in this building. They have Biosafety Level 2 security, which isn’t the full Fort Knox, but packs a punch. As part of that security, they have to comply with some pretty strict ECDC guidelines. If a fire alarm goes off twice in a 24-hour period, they need to undergo an outside inspection to make sure that there aren’t any leakages or biological contaminants. I guess when you’re working with the Corruption, they get pretty paranoid.”

“No problem, ” Tim said. “You want me to go set off their fire alarm? I can do that in my sleep. I think I _did_ do that in my sleep in third form.”

“Nope, no need,” Melanie continued. “For one thing, we don’t want the actual ECDC to arrive. Also, the Institute’s fire alarm system is controlled by computer. All I need to do is hack in and change tonight’s records to show that the fire alarm went off twice while the building was closed overnight. By the time that employees corroborate with night security, we’ll be in and out.”

“Right,” Jon said.“Martin, you have thirty minutes to meet with Peter, establish your alias, and get him to the secondary location. Tim will get you in through the basement since your stint with that cow means they’ll be looking for you in lobby security. Daisy, your job is to clear the office.”

Daisy raised one eyebrow. “You want me to clear the entire Institute out on the word of one ECDC agent?”

Jon shrugged. “I trust you’ll make it convincing.”

* * *

Tim was the first to go in, balancing his precarious tower of packages with enough theatrical alarm to attract attention from the lobby security, who hustled to open the door for him.

“Thanks, man,” Tim said cheerfully, turning through the door and causing both of them to immediately fall to the floor with one very careful turn of his ankle. “Oh gosh, sorry! Wasn’t looking where I was going.” He started to gather the packages on his hands and knees, and the ruffled security guard moved over to help. Tim’s method of picking up packages mostly seemed to be grabbing at them in a way that moved them farther away, until the two were conspicuously blocking foot traffic in front of the main door. Another security guard hastened over to help with the pickup process. Tim rose at the same time as both stood, patting one of his shoulders in easy camaraderie. “Thanks, bud,” he said, taking each of the bundles from them in an awkward handoff. “I’d trip over my own two feet!” The guards both looked hassled but bored, waving him on as Tim continued staggering through the lobby. Later, when trying to recount what Tim looked like, the memory will slide from their brains like oil, evasive, and viscous.

“I’ve got both of their security badges,” Tim said into the com as he turned into the elevator bay and opened up the main stairwell with one precarious hand. As soon as he was in the stairwell, he chucked the (empty) cardboard boxes to the side and started hustling down the stairs. “Martin, meet me at the east basement entrance.”

Daisy entered the lobby next, just as the security guards were brushing themselves off and returning to their posts. She casually registered with security, showing her badge before walking briskly towards the main elevator bank.

“I’m taking elevator four,” she said into the comms, hitting the button for the fifteenth floor. “Melanie, can you take out the elevator feed before I get in?”

“Sure thing,” Melanie said, pressing a few buttons on her laptop.

“Martin and Tim, once you’re in positions, take elevator four as well,” Jon instructed into the comms. “One broken elevator camera looks like a glitch, two looks like interference.”

Daisy walked down the hallway of the fifteenth floor, knocking briefly on the door emblazoned office doors of the Hoffman Institute before abruptly opening them without waiting for a response. “I’m Agent Bonanno with the ECDC,” Daisy said, flashing her counterfeit badge at the confused admin stationed by the front door. “I’m going to need all of you to leave this office immediately so I can inspect the premises. You’ve been found in violation of Ordinance E7, Section 45 of your BL-2 Guidelines.”

Melanie scowled in outrage. “Daisy— that’s not even a real ordinance! I gave you so many options! I printed out a list!”

“No one here cares,” Daisy said quietly through gritted tech.

The admin sputtered in outrage. “We’re not due for an ECDC check,” he said.“I haven’t been informed of any of this.”

Daisy made a show of checking her clipboard. “Did you, or did you not have two explained fire alarms in the last 24 hours?” She asked testily. “I’m required to do a thorough search of your labs to check for contamination.” She pulled on an extreme-looking gas mask that caused several employees who had popped up in their office doorways to hustle towards the exit.

The admin was searching frantically on his desktop, clicking through the security records and looking up nervously at Daisy. “We did, I guess, have two fire alarms last night,” he said reluctantly. “I don’t know why security wouldn’t have told —” 

“ I would suggest you get out,” Daisy said, her voice muffled through the gas mask. “Now.”

“Right,” the admin squeaked and pressed a button on the speaker attached to his desk. “All Hoffman employees to evacuate the vicinity immediately,” he reported. “This is not a drill.”

Daisy presided over the stream of people exiting the office with grim silence. Once she waved through the final nervous employee and closed the office door, she pulled off her mask and grinned. “All clear,” she reported, looking down at the gas mask in interest. “Might keep this.”

“Please, no one ask a follow-up question about that,” Tim said from his position in the building’s basement.“Just tell us when it’s clear, Daisy. Martin is trying to make friends with every spider in this basement.”

Martin frowned, a willowy spider running over his knuckles. “It’s one spider, Tim. You know, you can tell a lot about a building by the kind of spiders you find in them.”

“Martin,” Jon said patiently, resting his forehead in his hands. “Please don’t make friends with the spiders.” He and Melanie were sitting in the backroom of a pub four blocks from the Hoffmann Institute called The Three Candles, which featured a violently patterned rug and a single confused teenage worker, who was under the impression that Jon and Melanie were auditors going through the pub’s financial records.

“Sure I can’t get you anything?” Hee called from the bar in the front room, anxiously cleaning a pint glass. “There’s usually more of a lunch rush. Weird day.”

Jon and Melanie shared a guilty glance. The pub was technically closed, both on their website and a neon yellow sign advertising renovations just outside the front entrance.

“Okay, we’ve got access to elevator four,” Tim said, using both their security badges to call the elevator down to the secured basement. “We’re on our way up.”

“Ahhhhhh — problem guys,” Melanie said slowly, squinting at the security footage of the fifth-floor hallway. “There’s a woman coming back towards the office. One of the Institute employees— I think it’s Dr. Schneider from R&D?She’s — oh, she forgot her umbrella in the front hall.”

“Is she leaving?” Jon asked intently.

“Yeah,” Melanie added. “But she’s taking the lift down. Martin and Tim, she’s going to be standing right in front of you in about ninety seconds.”

“What do you mean, there’s someone still up there?” Martin whispered, sharing an alarmed look with Tim. “Melanie, I robbed them six months ago, they all know my face.”

Tim looked up at the lift ceiling. “Melanie, if you stop the carI can get us up and into the shaft.”

“No,” Martin said insistently. “Peter’s going to arrive any minute if he shows up and I’m not there—” he broke off as the lift slowed to a stop.

Tim hesitated and then looked over at Martin. “Okay, we’re gonna do this old school,” he said into the comms. “Martin, just go with it and don’t freak out.”

“Don’t freak out?” Martin repeated indignantly, just as the lift door dinged. Tim stepped quickly across the lift car, crowding him back against the wall, and pulled Martin’s head down to his.

In the milliseconds between panicking about blowing the mission and realizing what Tim was planning, Martin assumed that they were going to theatrically mash faces for a few seconds in order to divert Dr. Schneider’s attention away. People get uncomfortable at inappropriate PDA’s. It’s a good plan.

That’s not what happened.

Tim kissed him, yes, but was earnest and tender, not at all like the kind of thing Martin assumed would be part and parcel of the whole performative distraction tactic. Martin, however, is _extremely_ distracted, which seems like the opposite of what this is supposed to accomplish. Tim gently eased open Martin’s mouth with his own, and the wet heat of his tongue hovered delicately on Martin’s lips before Martin decided to grab the back of Tim’s head and just go for fucking broke.

Tim’s thumbs tucked into Martin’s belt loops, his hands hovering at the break between Martin’s rapidly untucked dress shirt and pants. Martin moaned embarrassingly loudly for someone who was attached to a group comms, and gripped Tim’s hair, using his handful to push Tim’s head back and kiss down the long line of his throat, conveniently hiding his face as the elevator doors finished opening and a very surprised and alarmed Dr. Schneider stood in the hallway.

“Oh, god,” she said, placing a hand like a visor over her brow and turning away. “ Seriously?”

Tim broke off and pushed Martin’s face from his neck down into his chest with one hand, as if Martin was hiding his face in embarrassment. “Oh gosh, I’m so sorry,” Tim said, his apologetic tone belying the dirty grin on his face. “We didn’t realize it was stopping, and, you know, I’ve always wanted to do it in a lift.”

Melanie clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing.

Several miles away, Jon was well into the process of turning bright red. “Well,” he said. “Ah. Quick thinking, Tim.”

“We’ll just take the stairs,” Tim continued, maneuvering them out of the lift as Dr. Schneider quickly stepped into the car, still not making eye contact with the two. “Sorry again!”

As soon as the lift doors closed, Martin lifted his head from Tim’s chest. “Seriously, Tim?” He asked, quickly tucking his dress shirt back into his slacks.

“Hey, in my defense, I said ‘don’t freak out,’” Tim pointed out.

“How was I supposed to know that meant ‘I am about to kiss you?’” Martin asked as the two moved quickly down the hallway and towards the doors to the Hoffman Institute office. “I thought you were about to, I don’t know, knock her unconscious!”

Tim beamed as he knocked on the door. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

“You’re a menace, is what you are,” Martin said, his color still high as he stared forward at the office door.

Daisy opened the door. “Welcome, you two,” she said, looking vaguely amused. “Martin, your office is ready. I’ve just got to rig the cameras and then Tim and I are out.”

Martin bustled through the door. Tim gave Daisy a wide-eyed, innocent look. Daisy rolled her eyes at him. “Let’s go jump out a window,” she said beckoning with her head. The other contents in Daisy's fake ECDC duffel were Tim's rig for scaling buildings. There were, Jon argued, safer ways of getting Tim and Daisy out of the office unseen, but Tim had put his foot down. 

Peter materialized in a haze of fog and static in the Hoffman Foundation lobby and looked around with indifference at the almost-empty room.

“Alright Blackwood,” Daisy muttered into her mic, looking up to the office windows above. “You’re up.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Lukas” Martin said, reaching out his hand to shake. “I’m Edward Dahl. Call me Eddie. Thank you for meeting with me.” Martin’s accent had flattened into a generic RP drawl and he had straightened the constant hunch in his shoulders, putting himself and Peter eye to eye. In a soulless and meticulously tailored suit, he was unrecognizable.

“Lovely to meet you, Eddie,” Peter said, putting his hands into his pockets. “ I don’t think I’ve ever seen you around here before.”

“Oh, I’m new,” Martin lied, smiling and pulling out a business card to hand over to Peter. “The Foundation has decided to pursue some alternative research methods. They hired me to secure the additional funding needed to implement the program. Why don’t we talk in my office?”

Melanie briefly muted Martin’s line on the comms. “I thought you said he was bad,” she hissed at Jon.

“I didn’t say that,” Jon lied, still listening intently with a look of slight consternation.

Martin’s stolen office featured a lofty window of the bustle of the street,a broad marble-topped desk, and a bookshelf decorated with eye-catching tomes on medical paranormal history. Daisy had arranged several photographs of Martin around the office that actually belonged to a man named Frank Mueller. One was a solo portrait of Martin posing in a field next to an enormous highland cow that Melanie must have digitally rendered. Martin gritted his teeth and tried very hard not to giggle nervously.

“What exactly are these new research methods?” Peter asked, taking a seat in the chair placed in front of Martin’s desk when Martin gestured.

“We want to learn more about how the powers of different entity-marked individuals and objects interact with each other in a controlled setting,” Martin began, pulling out several grant proposals printed in the official Hoffman Foundation stationary and laying them in front of Peter. “Normally, those kinds of interactions happen— well, organically, out in the world. As part of adversarial conflict. In those situations, we don’t get to see the biological effects of these conflicts. But if we could, we’d learn so much about how to measure the extent of entity marks and the way that they affect each other.”Martin sat back, twirling a pen in his hands in a distinctly un-Martin-like maneuver. “Think of it as a fourteen-sided game of rock, paper, scissors. But with extensive research and multiple trials, of course.”

Peter was shuffling through the papers with a gleam of interest in his eye. “This doesn’t sound like your usual fare,” he said genially. “Where are you sourcing your test subjects from?”

“He’s testing you, Martin,” Jon said through the comms. “Mention that you’re collaborating with the Pu Songling Research Center in Beijing. Zhang Xiaoling is the head archivist.”

“Oh, where we can,” Martin said easily. “The Pu Songling Research Center has been happy to lend us a few artifacts in exchange for data. Zhang Xiaoling has been particularly forthcoming with military artifacts. The people are easier to draw in. There’s always some poor sap who fell into a door and thinks that he’s suddenly having hallucinations. We offer pro bono medical consultation, and make sure that they don’t read the terms and conditions on their paperwork.”

Daisy cleared her throat. “Well, I hate him,” she said over the comms. “He’s doing great.”

Peter hummed, still looking down at the paperwork rather than at Martin. “You’re not working with the Magnus Institute? They’re certainly a little closer than Pu Songling.”

Martin smiled conspiratorially. “Oh, we’re open to all collaboration, but the Magnus Institute tends to be a bit more— let us say— _possessive_ about their artifacts and people.”

“Oh, I understand,” Peter said drily.

“Listen,” Martin said. “Why don’t we talk about this over lunch?”

Peter grimaced. “No, I don’t find restaurants pleasant.”

“Okay, Martin,” Jon instructed over the comms. “Remind him about the Derby.”

“Oh no, this one is almost always empty,” Martin said, before fidgeting and leaning in to confess, “and you know, I had hoped to catch the Romford afternoon races.”

It was always difficult to gauge which avatars were most susceptible to the Web; Jon knew that the Eye rankled at any symptom of manipulation or interference, while other entities seemed fairly content to drift within the orbit of the Web’s great design. He didn’t know if Peter Lukas was particularly susceptible to the Web, to Martin, or to his own sense of pompous curiosity, but he finally looked up at Martin speculatively. “Did you!” He said. “I didn’t take you for a greyhound man.”

“My gran raised them,” Martin lied. “I don’t get out to the track much anymore since she died, but I like to keep a hand in. I like to think I can recognize a winner on sight.”

Peter stacked the paperwork into a neat pile. “I suppose,” he said casually. “You’ll have to show me this talent of yours.”

* * *

“Alright,” Jon said over the comms. “Very— very well done, Martin. We’re moving to phase two. Melanie, do you have control of the TVs at the bar?”

“No, hacking the cable at a Weatherspoons was too much for me,” Melanie replied acidly.

“I’m going to interpret that as a yes.”

Melanie made a face at her screen. “Next time we take over a location, I get to make a pick. Wouldn’t say no to an open tab either.”

“Just make sure that there’s a sixty-second delay,” Jon said shortly. “They should be here any minute. Tim, are you in position?”

“Yep,” Tim said, hovering on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, still dressed in his delivery uniform. “Daisy is stowing the rig, but I’m in position. Just let me know when they come around the corner.”

Jon watched Martin’s body camera intently as he and Peter made their way down the street from the Hoffman Institute office. Peter was droning on about something related to the art of greyhound racing and asking Martin worryingly probing questions about his personal life. Had his parents also passed away? Partners? Not even pets?

“They’re turning the corner, Tim,” Jon said suddenly. “Make the lift.”

It was a delicately managed operation, picking the pocket of an avatar of isolation who also knew your face. However, Tim’s face was, when he wanted it to be, a particularly unknowable trait. He kept his head down and his face covered by the brim of his hat as he walked down the sidewalk, his shoulder lightly colliding with Peter’s as he passed him.

“Sorry,” Tim grunted, and Peter felt a jolt of — something. A momentary twisting or unbalancing the concealed the hand that dipped into the pocket of his peacoat. If he’d looked up at Tim’s face, he would have seen nothing, the outline of a man without the memory of what he looked like.

“Woah,” Martin said, holding out a hand but not touching him. “Are you okay, Mr. Lukas?”

“I’m fine,” Peter said peevishly. “I’m not used to . .. pedestrian travel. London has gotten more crowded than I expected.”

From the backroom, Melanie and Jon heard a door squeak and the overly-cheerful greeting of the teenage worker, who sounded wildly excited to have a single paying customer.

“Martin,” Jon said, rubbing his forehead, “I realize you have a lot on your plate, but please try to make sure Peter doesn’t disappear the waiter.”

“Yeah,” Martin said through gritted teeth while Peter’s back is turned. “I’m trying.”

Jon got up from the booth and started making his way towards the service entrance at the back of the building while their young friend was occupied in the bar area. “You keep an eye on them,” he instructed Melanie. “I’ll go get the mobile from Tim.”

Jon worked his way through the empty back kitchens of the Three Candles, unlocking the industrial door located near the freezer. He stepped into the dim back alley behind the bar, his eyes straining in the shade for Tim. He saw— someone. A person-shaped person hovering several feet away, unrendered like Jon had forgotten his glasses.

“Tim?” Jon asked uncertainly, trying to _see_ through the confusion.

There was a small shift, and Tim refocused, holding a mobile and looking prickly. “Sorry,” he said, in his way that sounded more angry than apologetic. “The off switch is harder than the on switch. Here’s Peter’s mobile.”

Jon took it, still looking at him warily. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine!” Tim insisted. “I got to jump out of a building before 3 pm, that’s better than my average Thursday. Shouldn’t you go focus on making sure Martin isn’t getting, like, yeeted into the Lonely?”

“Alright,” Jon said carefully, turning back towards the service exit. “Stick with Daisy once she gets back in case we need to make a quick exit.”

Melanie was frowning at her laptop when Jon emerged back into the back room of the Three Candles. “Let’s switch,” Jon said, sliding the mobile across the table to her.

Melanie scooted farther down in the booth, glaring at him. “Do not touch anything, Sims,” she said. “Report the results only.”

Jon huffed and started to narrate the race details to Martin in an annoyed monotone while Melanie plugged Peter’s mobile into a second laptop via a USB cord, rapidly running a program to copy and clone all of the mobile’s capabilities.

Martin appeared suddenly in the back room, startling them both. “He thinks I’m in the toilet,” he said tersely. “Melanie, do you have the mobile? I don’t want him to figure out it’s gone.”

Melanie disconnected it from her laptop and tossed it to Martin. “It’ll be fine, he has like everything on silent,” she said. “How’s the gambling going?”

“Martin shrugged. “I’m losing a lot of money,” he said. “It’s not hard.” He wheeled around and started back toward the bar area. Jon and Melanie could vaguely hear Peter’s cheerful greeting as they resumed their watch of the Romford races.

“I don’t get the point of rigging this to make him lose,” Daisy said into the comms. She and Tim were hovering a block down from the pub in case Martin needed an emergency extraction.

“Losing creates a connection,” Jon explained. “Peter’s got money to throw around if he loses, but he’s both more willing to trust Martin and required to interact with him again if Martin owes him money.”

“Huh,” Daisy said. “ Is that why you’re so bad at pub trivia? You could have just made me a friendship bracelet, Sims.”

“For Christ’s sake, it’s cheating to use my omniscient fear god powers to look up the best hits ofSeventies prog rock,” Jon snapped.

Martin pretended to run a hand over the bottom of his face to conceal a grin that was inappropriate for a man losing hundreds of pounds. “Next one on Typhoon Jane,” he said, throwing another hundred-pound bill on the table as he also dropped Peter’s mobile back into his coat pocket. 

“I appreciate your resilience,” Peter said condescendingly, matching him.

“I’m just in a rut,” Martin replied. “It’ll even out.”

Typhoon Jane did win, because Martin was supposed to lose money but he didn’t want to look totally incompetent. He won the next round too, on a sprinter named Tinkers Pencil (who _named_ these greyhounds?), enough to put Eddie in a boisterously confident mood that Peter couldn’t help but ruin.

“Double or nothing on the final round,” he said, throwing the stack of cash on the table.

Martin took a moment to look uncertain because Eddie Dahl was a marketing and outreach director at a nonprofit trying to afford rent in London. Eddie Dahl was also a gambling addict, though, so Martin took another sip of the lager that he hated but Eddie loved and agreed to Peter’s terms. Peter looked delighted. They both watched as the greyhounds were released from their starting boxes, racing down the track like whippets while the announcer listed the headliners in a carefully inflected monotone.

“So,” Peter said, tapping one broad finger on the bar. “What do you think?”

“Last round goes to Brighter Days,” Jon said through the comm.

Martin pursed his mouth. “Double or nothing on Smiler Jack,” he said, not turning his eyes away from the screen.

Peter nodded. “I’m on Brighter Days, then.”

The two men watched the end of the race, and Peter relaxed back into his chair, luxuriating in the isolated anxiety rolling off of Eddie Dahl, though this was actually a product of Martin knowing that the most delicate process of the grift was ahead of him. He’d never stopped being nervous about high-stakes manipulation, no matter how much experience he had. Annabelle was always exasperated about that.

“Fair game,” Martin said with a shrug. “You certainly know your way around a greyhound race. I . . . might need to write you an IOU, I don’t carry that kind of cash on me.”

Peter smiled benignly. “Oh, I’m not worried. I know where to find you.”

“I promise that I’m a better research director than I am a gambler,” Martin said, laughing a little bitterly. “As inopportune a moment as this might be, I also want to see if we can depend on you for this new research project. Your contribution would be heavily appreciated.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Peter said, not even turning to look at Martin as he focused on the last of the races on the TV overhead. “While fascinating, this whole project seems a bit reckless.”

“Alright, Martin,” Jon said over the comms, sighing. “It was a good attempt. Walk away.”

“I absolutely understand,” Martin said, holding up his hands. “I figured that this kind of investment is more suited to the Fairchilds.”

“ _Martin_ ,” Jon repeated more intensely into the comms. “ _Walk away_.”

Peter turned back and looked up and down at Martin speculatively. “What did you just say?”

Martin shrugged. “Oh, we’re in the process of contacting several current patrons for this project; I’d assumed you knew the Fairchild family.” He shuffled the papers and slotted them back in his messenger bag carelessly. “They’re certainly keen on the more experimental projects around here. Well— I assume you’ve met Simon, you don’t need me to tell you that.”

Peter looked at Martin with a combination of admiration and irritation. “I know you’re trying to manipulate me.”

Martin smiled the conspiratorial, sunny smile of a nonprofit marketer whose talents in persuasion had only ever been used to play rich donors against each other. “I would certainly hope so, Mr. Lukas.”

There was a long beat of silence as Peter and Martin sized each other up and everyone on the comms held their breath. Jon was white-knuckling the edge of the pub table. 

Peter chuckled and drew a hand into his coat pocket, pulling out a battered leather wallet. “Why don’t you come up to Moorland House tomorrow.You can give me an example of this new research methodology and you can write me a check. If all goes well, I guess I’ll write you a bigger check.”

Martin pretended to sputter. “Mr. Lukas, I’m honored, but— I mean, I would ideally show you in a controlled space— we have special rooms back at the Hoffman Institute offices for this sort of thing.”

Peter smirked. “Oh, I’m sure you can figure something out. You seem like the resourceful type.” He tossed a single business card onto Martin’s area of the bar and stood to leave. “I’ll let them know that you’ll be coming to the gate. Let’s say at two o’clock!” Peter disappeared with a shiver of static.

Martin stilled, looking down at the business card with an expression of slightly pleased confusion. They had discussed this, the possibility that Peter would linger and watch him for some time after his initial departure, so Martin sat back and steeled himself for another half hour of passive TV watching before he would get up to leave. Jon was already tersely monologuing into the comms, which Martin chose to temporarily ignore as he relaxed into the worn seats of the bar.

“That guy was a little off, right?” The young waiter said, popping out from behind the kitchen like a nervous meerkat.

“Mate, you have no idea,” Martin said, putting his head into his hands.

* * *

They reconvened back in Melanie’s flat, which had become, despite her halfhearted objections, the home base for their operations. No one really felt comfortable going to their own homes, given Peter Lukas’ ease with explosive devices, and Melanie had airtight security and good snacks. Daisy had claimed one of the guest rooms and Tim and Martin had split the other; Daisy offered to share with Jon, but Jon had built himself a cocoon of blankets and stacks of files around the armchair in Melanie’s living room. He’d barely slept in the time since they first escaped Lukas’ C4-rigged hangar, and the bags under his eyes were moving away from what Martin would have described as “tortured Victorian poet” and towards “advert for sleep deprivation.”

“God, it’s like a nest,” Melanie had said, gesturing at the armchair with one hand in alarm. “A nest of overwork and sadness.” Jon ignored her.

Melanie’s hijacking of Peter’s mobile had yielded tremendous results; not only could Melanie trace his whereabouts (outside of the Lonely) and listen in on all of his calls, but she could turn on his mobile phone at any time, which she had deployed in order to take several scans of his family estate. 

The large flatscreen on the wall showed a blueprint of Moorland House, the Lukas estate in Worm Hill. Jon had taken over briefing duties from Melanie, getting up and gesturing with his hands rather than using her laser pointer, which Melanie was still deploying like a sniper sight at anyone who was bothering her. “Moorland House isn’t highly secured,” he explained. “At least, not in the way that you’d expect. The estate itself is physically isolated in the Kentish Downs, and there is, well, the presence of — “

“Spookiness,” Tim finished. “You can just say ‘spookiness,’ boss.”

“Right,” Jon said reluctantly. “Well, while the estate has the trappings of a security system, they don’t seem to be particularly concerned about people getting _in_. Getting out is another manner entirely. Tim, I know you— “ he stopped. “It would be best if no one saw or recognized you.”

“Faceless, then,” Tim said with false casualness. “Got it.”

“What’s the compartment that the Leitner is being stowed in?” Daisy asked, gesturing towards a red dot near the east wing foyer. “Looks high tech for Lukas.”

“Yes, I’m guessing that the rest of the family intervened, given Peter’s Luddite tendencies,” Jon said, adjusting his glasses as he focused on Melanie’s scans. “The Lukas’ operate most of their financial resources through fairly antiquated means— I think there’s even a storage area for gold somewhere on this floor— but when it comes to an artifact like this Leitner, it seems that they’re willing to make an exception. The container is the highest grade archival storage and security money can buy. Think of it as the opposite of a hyperbaric chamber; it’s a small airtight compartment that actively filters out oxygen in order to preserve old documents. The outer shell is insulated ballistic glass, and it’s attached to a small motor and air tank underneath. You can’t break into it on short notice with anything less than, I don’t know, a laser drill or a good quantity of C4.”

He stopped and realized that everyone in the room was looking at him with a mix of surprise and admiration.

“Okay, but did you know that or did you _Know_ it?” Martin asked.

“I was technically working as an archivist for a while,” Jon said defensively. “I picked up a few things.”

“So we stage both the Hurrah and the In-and-In at Moorland House,” Melanie said, who had clearly spent the previous evening reading up on con terminology to keep from being caught out of the loop. “Jon and Daisy stage the Hoffman trial for Peter somewhere in a drivable perimeter, I broadcast it to Martin, who runs the grift from the house, and Tim breaks into the Leitner. Quick question: are we sure sending Tim into the headquarters of the Lonely is our best bet?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tim challenged hotly.

“That you’re the least equipped to be hanging out alone with the literal entity of isolation and depression,” Melanie said bluntly.

“I mean, he won’t be totally alone,” Martin protested. “I’ll be there.”

“You’ll be focused on Lukas,” Daisy replied pragmatically. “You can’t watch his back while you’re running a grift.”

Jon took off his glasses and cleaned them with the end of his shirt, probably so he wouldn’t have to make eye contact with anyone. “She’s got a point, Tim,” he said delicately. “I mean— should we be worried?”

“I’m fine,” Tim spat. “And unless any of you can suddenly climb up a four-story building, I’m the one who needs to break into the house.” Tim was suddenly aware of his furious tone and, flushing, tried to lower his voice. “Seriously,” he said more lightly. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I can do it.”

“So the assessment is ‘fine,’” Melanie added, raising her eyebrows while looking down at her tablet. Jon shot her a long-suffering glare. Martin still looked earnest and concerned, so Tim didn’t look at him.

The room lapsed into a semi-comfortable silence as they worked, Melanie continuing to hack into the security systems at Moorland House and Daisy quietly muttering on her mobile as she called old contacts they might need to fake the Hoffman medical trials. It was nice, actually— Jon hadn’t worked alone but with others in months, since he and Sasha and Basira would silently research their latest statement, passing back and forth relevant maps and books across their desks.

Melanie and Tim were apparently back to harmless bickering like they hadn’t been at each other’s throats a half-hour prior. Jon didn’t really understand it; perhaps it was something that you picked up when you were raised with siblings.

“Melanie,” Tim called from the far end of the room, where he was sitting and appraising a wall of mounted gadgets. “Melanie, could you make me more of those window sockets, but smaller? Like this thing— oh, nope, that’s a laser.”

“Tim if you touch anything on that wall I will put your name on every no-fly list I can find,” Melanie threatened.

Daisy snorted. “Bold of you to assume that he isn’t already.”

Tim grinned up from his position on the floor. “Hey, we all went through a D.B. Cooper phase.”

“Sorry, who’s D.B. Cooper?” Martin asked, which set off a round of laughter and gasps and a really inappropriate number of Youtube clips that added nothing to the planning process. Jon tried to summon some irritation about it and failed. He also _Knew_ who D.B. Cooper was (Jon wasn’t totally immune to the potential silver linings of supernatural omniscience) but offering his beheld-procured answer seemed counterintuitive to the process. Martin looked over and grinned conspiratorially at Jon as if guessing exactly why Jon wasn’t contributing to the group’s wild theorizing.

Daisy yawned and crushed an empty seltzer can with one hand; Martin looked on warily as he drifted off into the kitchen.

“Make sure you recycle that,” Tim said, still tinkering with a pile of gadgets that Melanie had apparently green-lighted. “Martin has a thing about responsible recycling practices. He’ll yell at you.” 

“So how did—” Jon began, with no idea whether or not he was venturing into dangerous waters. “How did you two meet, exactly?”

Tim snorted, not looking up from his process of soldering a flat platform onto one of the smaller glass sockets. “Martin? He broke into my flat.”

There was a small crash in the kitchen and Martin, looking indignant and holding an R2D2 mug, stepped out back towards the lounge. “I didn’t break in,” he insisted. “I had a key.”

“Oh,” Jon said, surprised and curious and trying not to sound either. Talking to Tim was still a little like playing a game of Minesweeper.

Tim knew, of course, that Jon was dying to ask him exactly why Martin had broken into his flat, but he was feeling possessive about the information. He couldn’t tell if it was jealousy— that it was one of the few things he had of Martin that wasn’t totally built around Martin’s Altar Of Jon— or indignation on Martin’s behalf, that Jon was only now interested in Martin after dismissing him for years. Everyone, in Tim’s opinion, should be interested in Martin.

* * *

Tim was not interested in Martin when they first met. To be fair, Tim was not really interested in anything when they first met.

Sasha had told Tim all about Martin and his ill-judged pursuit of Jon during their weekly meetings. Initially, Tim has absolutely zero intention to meet with a jumped-up library that purportedly wanted to ‘keep him in line,’ but then he met Sasha, and learned that the Institute was less a private Beholding militia and more a loose collection of archivists with absolute tire fires of personal lives.

So, Sasha started as a semi-ironic source of entertainment and quickly became a friend. Tim called her his “spooky parole officer” for the first few weeks that they worked together, while Sasha protested that she was an archival specialist and not a cop. After a while, it became their running bit; Sasha would do her best Spam Spade impression and glower at him from across the table of their nondescript coffee shop as if Tim was a homme fatale who had legs for days and a dark family secret. “Timothy Stoker,” she said, her eyes laughing behind the lenses of her glasses. “Are you still pursuing a life of crime?”

Tim had a different answer for her each week. “Actually, I’ve decided to become a professional kayaker,” he said earnestly. “I think I could really bring something new and exciting to the realm of watersports.”

Sasha groaned and threw a file at his face, which Tim caught midair with the grace and agility of a cat burglar. He pulled one of Jon’s terrible forms out and reached for the pen that was lying on the table. “Okay,” he said musingly, looking down at the form and making small checks,“I am I breaking any national or international laws? — definitely. Am I causing mass harm to the British public?— only if you consider one very nasty private collector ‘the British public.’ Do I need to be forcibly detained by Section 31?— no, that’s not my preferred version of a good time in handcuffs.”

“You know, I do have to re-fill that form every time we meet,” Sasha said drily, her eyes still laughing.

“Oh, I’m sure big boss Sims requires constant assurance that I’m not sowing terror by stealing a few Renoirs,” Tim said, putting down the form. “But tell me what’s happening in the Institute. Has Martin botched another heist to try and get Jon’s attention?”

Sasha grinned. “Oh, you’re going to love this. It involves an octopus and a cyanide scuba suit. Apparently, Martin _really_ hates Seaworld.” 

Two years later, Tim was lying on his couch in a state of resentful catatonia. He wasn’t really sure how much time had passed, but his clothing and couch no longer smelled like smoke and wax. Tim wasn’t exactly doing regular rotas of laundry, so that probably meant something.

Tim had assumed, after Danny, that the Stranger had marked him and let him go in order to make him suffer, to carry the memory of the underground circus forever as a kind of compounding fear interest. The fact that people had a hard time recognizing or remembering Tim was a bitter silver lining. It certainly made his criminal career that much easier, though Tim would have foregone that any other talent he possessed in order to bring his brother back. Tim wasn’t a faithful servant of the Stranger the way that other marked individuals were— the way that Sasha coexisted peacefully with her driving sense of curiosity and voyeurism rather than regarding it as a festering cancer to be cut out. It was worse after Sasha died. It was one thing to deal with the survivor’s guilt, to be the one who was left alive in a horrible, accidental encounter. It was another to be existentially chained to the entity that killed your best friend, to be aware of the parts within yourself that belonged to it.

Tim meditated on this as he laid on his couch; it was the closest thing to being productive that he’d managed in days. It wasn’t really the kind of couch that was built for depressive wallowing, was the thing. Tim had picked most of his furniture on the basis of style and whether it was a promising venue for sex.The whole flat originally began as an exercise in sleek minimalism: a bare, chic aesthetic first ruined by wide bookcase stuffed with worn paperbacks and decorated with a few pictures of Tim’s family— the early days, when the four of them would go hiking on the weekends and clown around with a disposable camera. Then Tim had started hanging horrifically tacky paintings on the walls because it made Sasha laugh. Tim wasn’t stupid enough to keep priceless artifacts in his living space, and there was something satisfying about an art thief that displayed a foolish rendition of ‘Dogs Playing Poker.’ 

So, when someone knocked tentatively at Tim’s front door and then just _opened_ it, Tim wasn’t particularly concerned that he was about to be burgled. Either one of Tim’s neighbors was worried and checking in on him, or Tim was about to be murdered by the world’s politest assassin.

The man who entered, cast in shadow by the emerging light of the hallway, was tall and juggling large packages, several of which seemed to be Tim’s mail.

“What,” Tim said flatly.

“Oh my god,” the man hissed, jumping and dropping several of the packages on the ground. He had a highish, pleasant voice with a vaguely northern accent. “Christ, where are you? Why are all of your lights off?”

“It’s _my flat_ ,” Tim pointed out, just as the man moved backward to grope for the light switch by the front door. Tim scowled against the sudden flood of light into the lounge.

“That’s— um, that’s better,” the man said, squinting in obvious consternation at the mess that spread over the lounge and kitchen. “So, you probably wonder what I’m doing here,” he said, laughing uncomfortably.

“Yeah.”

“I’m Martin,” the man offered. “Martin Blackwood.”

Tim had kind of expected someone weedy, the kind of unobtrusive schemer that the Web would covet. Martin was taller than him, big, and moved like a bull trying to navigate through an existential china shop. He had large, wire-rimmed glasses that were falling down his freckled nose, and he made a shrugging motion as if to push them back up his face before remembering that he was holding several bulky packages. Martin looked comfortable— the sort of person that gave great hugs and would be safe to introduce to your family, if Tim had had any family left— but that was offset by his aura of nervous discomfort, like he was trying to take up less space and failing. Tim wasn’t sure if that was a permanent feature or just because Martin had broken into his flat.

“You’re Martin?” Tim asked. “Jon’s Martin?”

Martin blushed. “Oh! I mean— did he say that? I guess we did spend a lot of time—”

“Whatever,” Tim said, turning away. “How did you even get in?”

“Oh, I told your downstairs neighbor that I’m your friend from uni,” Martin said mildly, putting the first of a few square Tupperware containers on Tim’s kitchen table after clearing off the detritus of beer bottles into the trash with the repentant wince of an avid recycler. “Mrs. Dalaal. She gave me your key. She’s worried about you. She says to come down and say hi to Percy sometimes. I couldn’t tell if Percy was a child or a dog.”

“Dog,” Tim said automatically.

“Oh,” Martin said brightening, and Tim distantly remembered Sasha’s story about Martin and the dog in the Institute. “That’s nice! What kind of dog?”

“What are you doing here, Martin?”

Martin finished stacking the containers of what smelled like stew on Tim’s table. “I just wanted to see if you were okay,” he said, looking down at Tim’s kitchen table. “I thought you might be— you know— having a tough time?”

And this, Tim thought darkly, was the million-dollar karmic payoff for treating Institute drama as his personal soap opera for the last two years. He’d always known that Sasha must mention him to her coworkers, but given that she was turning a blind eye to literally all of his thefts, Tim assumed that Sasha kept quiet about the extent of their friendship. Apparently not. It was odd to have Martin, who Tim had always considered more of a comic sideplot than a flesh-and-blood human, staring back at him. In his flat.

“What tipped you off, do you think?” Tim asked bitterly.

Martin flinched, and Tim felt distantly guilty. “Sorry,” he said.

“No, it was a stupid question,” Martin said, scratching the back of his head in discomfort. He looked around the walls of the lounge and grimaced. “Oh, that’s so much worse than I expected,” he said, before starting. “The paintings, I mean! Not the whole apartment, I heard that you liked hanging bad art, but . . . wow.”

“There’s a watercolor of the top ten American roller coasters in the bathroom,” Tim said. “If you want to do the full tour.” It came out harsher than he intended.

“I guess I just wanted to see if you needed anything?” Martin asked.

Tim needed a lot of things. “No,” he said.

“Right,” Martin said hesitantly. “I’ll just . . . go then.”

After Martin left, Tim saw a small spider ambling across his kitchen floor. He stomped on it viciously and decided that that was probably the end of his interactions with Martin, who was sad and confused and obviously still pining after Jon. He tried some of the stew, which was annoyingly delicious, and threw the rest out. 

Martin showed up again a few days later and made them both tea, grimacing as he scrubbed away the slimy film on the inside of Tim’s mugs. Tim didn’t drink the tea, but it felt nice in his hands, like a warm anchor pressing down on his lap.

“I’ve been working on some poetry,” Martin said. Martin was a nervous talker, Tim had learned. If they had met earlier, Tim would have enjoyed teasing him a little, getting him to a point where he got impatient and forgot to be nervous. Instead, he sat listlessly while Martin lobbed conversational volleys into the silence of the room.

“I always wanted to open my own bookstore, actually,” Martin added, “Once things calmed down.”

_Things_ were apparently ‘my criminal career,’ Tim thought silently. He considered making a jab about Jon and Sasha’s opinions of Martin’s criminal career but found that he didn’t have the energy.

“I could host poetry readings there,” Martin continued. “And students could come in and work as long as they’d like. I never got to go to uni, so it’d be nice, having my own reading space.”

Martin went on about his plans for this bookstore, which was apparently also a coffeeshop: what kinds of books he would stock there and the importance of free refills for students and whether he should host a trivia night or keep the space a haven for the quieter sort. Tim heard it as if underwater, Martin’s lilting voice running over his laughably optimistic hopes and dreams. Martin was surprisingly persistent— he’d have to be, Tim thought, to be interested in Jon. Tim’s impression of Jon wavered somewhere between Officer Krupke and Marian the Librarian, and he could only imagine how exhausting it would be to pursue all _that_.

“Did you, um—” Martin started. “Did you ever think about what you’d want to do? I mean, after your last job.”

Tim scoffed. “I blew up a few hundred avatars of the Stranger,” he said. “That was pretty much the only item on my bucket list.”

Tim knew, in the back part of his mind, that he was being an enormous arsehole. Some past version of Tim, the one that was raised by diligent and loving parents and taught that being kind was just as important as being funny, would be mortified. Martin meant well— Tim was pretty sure that Martin’s Institute file began with the sentence ‘ _He means well_ ’ — but Tim also resented Martin’s presence as a reminder that Tim had no one else, that this total stranger reaching out in guilt and rerouted concern represented Tim’s sum total connection to the outside world.

“You’re good at this,” Tim said, waving his hand around at the flat. “Caretaking.”

Martin frowned into his tea. “Yeah. My mum got sick when I was pretty young, so I was in charge of— well, a lot. I got used to doing everything around the house. It was helpful too, I guess, once she died and I bounced around in foster care before I ended up with Annabelle.”

Tim lifted his head from the couch cushions. “Annabelle Crane was your foster mother?”

Martin looked at him oddly. “Well—yeah— I mean, one of them. I thought maybe Sa— I thought you already knew.”

“You can say her name,” Tim said. “It’s not like ‘Voldemort.”

“Right,” Martin said carefully.“Well, Sasha used to mention you when we crossed paths. Oliver too, I know he was one of her cases. It’s not like she told me tons of stuff, but she seemed to like talking about you.I was always a little jealous, actually.”

“Of me?” Tim asked.

“Yep. Not like— I mean, Sasha was very lovely, but I’m not — “

“Yeah, I get it, Martin,” Tim interrupted.

“I was just jealous that you two seemed to be friends,” Martin said in a rush. “That she never really minded about all . . . y’know, the crime and spookiness.”

“Like Jon, you mean.” It was Tim’s personal curse that every conversation he now had would be somehow about Jonathan Sims.

Martin looked cautiously defensive. “Yeah, sure. Like Jon did.”

“If it makes you feel better,” Tim drawled, “I don’t think Jon was horrible to you because he disapproves of supernatural crime. He’s just a pompous idiot.” 

“Come on Tim, that’s not really fair,” Martin protested.

“A lot of things aren’t fair.” 

“Yeah,” Martin said softly. “Yeah, I know.”

Martin seemed to understand that Jon was a volatile topic of conversation for both of them. Instead, he started telling Tim stories about his run-ins with Sasha, talking about her good-hearted attempts to keep him out of prison while carefully avoiding any mention of Jon.

It finally occurred to Tim, as he listened, that Martin was also probably devastatingly lonely. Martin, who had stolen several million dollars of first editions and whose pipe dream was apparently running a bookstore slash coffee shop for students in Camden. Martin, who didn’t seem particularly bothered about visiting a total stranger in the middle of the day and receiving mostly barbed comments in return. Tim had never really thought about how other entity-touched criminals must feel about their inability to really connect to anyone who wasn’t cued into the whole fear landscape of it all, or other fear-touched individuals who turned away from and denied their experiences, clinging to the life they had before. The Web was notoriously interpersonal, unlike the Stranger, but Martin didn’t seem like he had anyone, much less a communal hive or something.

“You know, MI-5 has a car outside your building,” Martin said, the next time that he let himself in without fanfare.

Tim grunted. “Yeah. It was only a matter of time.”

“Um— do you know if it was for the explosion in Yarmouth, or like, something else?” Martin asked.

Tim shrugged. “Probably Yarmouth. Not like I’m out and about doing a lot of heists these days.”

“Right,” Martin said, going to the window and lifting the curtain aside nervously. “Are you planning on doing something about it?”

Tim laid back against his couch, and let his exhaustion wave over him. “No,” he said. “I figure if they’re really gung ho about getting rid of me, they’ll just radio in Section 31 to finish the job.”

Martin’s eyes narrowed. “What,you’re just going to mope in here and wait around to see if they feel like killing you?”

“Probably.”

“That’s not good, Tim.”

“Yeah, I know it’s not good,” Tim said defensively.

“No, apparently you don’t,” Martin snapped. “Do you know how many people out there are trying to kill you? Section 31 aside, Elias is somewhere swanning about and thinking he’s won, which is— _the worst_ — and you and Jon have just _given up_ , and Sasha would be furious, but she’s not here to be, so I guess I have to do it!”

“No one asked you to!” Tim shouted, finally sitting up from the couch and glaring at Martin. “This literally has nothing to do with you! Look, I get that it’s Jon that you want to be bringing stew to and washing dishes for. I’m stuck as your weird pity proxy, but I don’t know you and I don’t need you to hover around me like some sort of keeper and tell me what I should be doing. We’re not friends.”

“Fine,” Martin said shortly. “Fine! God forbid I feel concerned about more than one person, but you just keep stewing here and passively courting death.” He stood up and started towards the door, picking up an empty bottle on his way out. “And learn how to fucking recycle,” he added. “It’s irresponsible.”

Tim had actually been a Boy Scout and run an Earth Day drive for his block as a kid, but that fact was too depressing to use as a rejoinder.He head the door slam when Martin left.

The car that was idling across the street from Tim’s kitchen window disappeared, and Tim felt sheepish enough to let a small spiderweb develop in his hallway. He waited around for Martin to come back, but Martin had apparently hit his limit. Tim couldn’t blame him, honestly.

Tim met with and discarded a therapist, who was nice but totally unable to understand Tim’s predicament. “My best friend died,” Tim said, fidgeting. “I think I was a little bit in love with her. My brother died too, a while back. And my parents before that. It’s been a fucking unpleasant few years.” That certainly covered the broad strokes of the situation but glossed over the eldritch monsters and the semi-suicidal revenge plot and Jon. The therapist helped with some things, though; Tim has scoffed at a lot of the grounding techniques that she initially mentioned, but it did help him to list out facts or imagine a favorite painting in detail when his sense of self got too blurry when the Stranger was intruding and his face started to feel like a sticky plastic mask. The therapist called it ‘anxiety’ and not ‘an eldritch fear god possessing your soul,’ but there was apparently some useful overlap.

After a few weeks, Tim convinced himself to go steal a few artifacts from the British Museum as a refresher. That helped as well, getting back into the mindset. It took a while before Tim realized that there was no way that MI-5 had just left him alone, and that Mrs. Dalaal, while friendly, was nowhere near naive enough to hand over Tim’s apartment keys to a random stranger, no matter how cute his freckles were.So maybe the ‘raised by the mother of puppets’ thing made sense after all.

Tim started keeping tabs on Martin after that; he still had enough contacts in London to hear whenever someone had pulled off a particularly noteworthy job. So when he heard that someone _set fire to Elias Bouchard’s flat_ , he poured himself a celebratory drink and then called Oliver Banks immediately.

“They’re saying that it’s the Desolation’s work,” Oliver said in lieu of a greeting. 

Tim hummed, twirling the straw in his cocktail. “Uh-huh. And what do you say?”

“Honestly, I thought it might be you. It’s— sorry, but it’s a bit _petty_ for the Desolation, isn’t it? Elias wasn’t in his flat when it caught fire, after all, and they’d gun for the Institute directly.”

Tim hummed again, this time trying for coyness. “And what are the Desolation saying?”

Oliver snorted. “Jude Perry’s offering to buy whoever did it a drink, though that might just be an attempt to draw out the competition.” He paused. “Was it you, though? Honestly, it would be nice to hear that you were back in the game.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny anything,” Tim said cheerily and sent three dozen dahlias to Martin’s next poetry reading with a small note attached that simply read “S _orry. Thanks for having my back_.” Martin sent him back a padded envelope with a single packet of matches inside. There was a small yellow Post-it note on top of the matchbook on which Martin had scrawled:

_Me too.Take your time. Promise me you’ll try to stay on the outside of the building for the next one._

_-MKB_

Tim folded the note and matchbook into his jacket pocket.

The next time Tim saw Martin, it was nine months later, across the room at a poetry reading in Chelsea. Tim was still smarting from a second near-death experience with C4, albeit one that he hadn’t engineered himself, which he was choosing to see as personal growth. He was also sitting with _Jon_ of all people, and realizing two things simultaneously.

The first that Martin was actually quite lovely.Tim still wanted to hug him, but the list of other activities Tim wanted had lengthened considerably.

The second was that Tim had rashly engineered a situation where he was going to have to watch Martin pine over Jon for the entire time that they were working together. Tim was an idiot.

* * *

When Jon had bullied Daisy into going to pick up the takeout with him and Melanie was ensconced in her bank of computers, Tim snuck up behind Martin on the couch. “So Martin,” he started, grinning when Martin jumped and upset the pile of diagrams on hyperbaric chambers.

“Jesus Tim, make a noise,” he snapped.

“Cat burglar,” Tim said unrepentantly, swinging over to sit on the arm of the couch. “Hey listen, about today. Are we okay?”

Martin looked up from where he was reassembling his stacks of paper. “Are we okay about what?” He asked, momentarily confused, before— “Oh, yeah. I mean, Jon was right. Quick thinking.”

“Seriously, though,” Tim said, losing his tone of casual amusement and looking over at Martin earnestly. “Con aside, it was kind of a dick move. I’m sorry.”

Martin scoffed. “Tim, less than a year ago you yelled at me for daring to do your dishes, and this is where you’re worried about being a dick?”

“Yeah,” Tim said. “Sorry for that too. I’ve been . . . working on it.”

“I know,” Martin hastened to add. “I’m glad. I mean— I get it.”

They sat for a minute in semi-comfortable silence as Martin reshuffled his piles of research and Tim leaned against the back of the couch, pretending to read a manual on document storage and looking at Martin instead.

“Just — give me a code word or something next time,” Martin said abruptly. “I wouldn’t be so caught off guard. I mean, I could it make it more— believable.”

“I didn’t have any complaints,” Tim replied, grinning. “Wait, so you think we’re going to have to do it again?”

“No, probably not,” Martin began, flustered. “I mean—”

“— because I was lying about the elevator thing,” Tim continued, “but there would be something deeply satisfying about making out on the Lukas estate.”

“That would definitely break my cover, Tim,” Martin said in a stroppy tone that Tim was beginning to learn was Martin’s version of flirting.

Tim shrugged, delighted. “Well, the option's open,” he said. “If you feel the need to improvise.”

“I’m literally still sitting right here,” Melanie announced from behind her bank of computers. Martin blushed.

“We know, Melanie,” Tim replied. “This is key operations planning, right here.”

“It doesn’t count if the operation is in your pants, Tim,” Melanie shot back.

Tim opened his mouth to make an extremely clever retort about operations planning and his pants when he saw that Martin looked embarrassed and swallowed it. “Sorry,” he called instead and tucked his socked feet under Martin’s thigh.

They worked in silence for several more minutes before Tim wiggled the big toe that was anchored under Martin’s leg to get his attention. “Hey,” he said, still pitching his voice to make clear that Melanie was included in this conversation. “Also, not that what you did today wasn’t very cool, and hot— because it was— ”

“The point any day now, Tim,” Martin said, not looking up from his notes.

“I just wanted to make sure you know that you don’t need to prove yourself to us or anything, just because you joined up later,” Tim added. “You don’t need to put yourself in harm's way just to show us how talented you are.”

Martin raised an eyebrow at him. “What, so _you’re_ lecturing _me_ about self-preservation, now?”

Tim shrugged. “Yeah, if it works.”

“I’ll second that,” Melanie said. “Look, Martin, if all else fails we can always just kill Peter.”

Tim toasted her with one of the half-drunk seltzers that were now littering the coffee table. “Love that journey for us,” he said, taking a long swig and setting it back on the table, making a face at the weird, faint taste of mango. “Ugh, Melanie, these are gross. Anyway, we’ve got two pretty accomplished arsonists here. We could just burn Peter’s house down.”

When Jon and Daisy returned with the food, amicably arguing about some plotline on the Archers, Tim watched as Jon’s gaze flitted over to the two of them on the couch cautiously, like someone casing a mark that they worried might catch on.

Matin got up and ambled over to Jon with his notes, gesturing towards something enthusiastically and explaining a new detail or angle that Jon clearly hadn’t thought of, because his gaze sharpened and he forgot to wear that look of slightly insulting surprise whenever Martin did something brilliant. He started scribbling, talking enthusiastically to Martin a mile a minute, and Martin looked so bafflingly pleased that Tim felt a complicated twist of jealousy. It wasn’t that he wanted Jon to continue being a pompous bastard to Martin— the opposite, really— but it was hard to quench a feeling of inexplicable loneliness.

Tim knew that the right thing to do would be to back off and let Jon and Martin happen organically. Jon was already reconsidering Martin, and Martin’s crush was still visible from space. It would take a while, sure, but if they weren’t all killed horribly in the next forty-eight hours, they might actually work. But Tim was a thief, and he specialized in stealing what he shouldn’t. 

* * *

Several hours later, a sharp knock echoed on the front door of Melanie’s flat. Jon immediately went from an untidy collection of limbs in his armchair to practically vibrating with tension in the space between the living room and the front door. Daisy stood up more casually, surveying the room around her like she was taking stock of every potential household object that she could use as a weapon within a fifteen-foot radius.

“Melanie, who is that?” Jon asked sharply, but he didn’t wait for an answer and must have _known_ it because he suddenly relaxed. “Oh,” he added tiredly. “Yes, I suppose that makes sense.”

Melanie pulled up her security feeds on her monitors and then looked over at Daisy. “Um, I feel like this is kind of your call?” she asked awkwardly.

“Yeah,” Daisy said, looking uncomfortable but also hesitantly eager. She slouched a little from what was originally a fighting stance and shoved her hands in her pockets nervously. “Yeah, that’s fine, Melanie. Thanks.”

“What a fun conversation you three are having,” Tim said loudly.

“Shut up, Tim,” Jon said absently, moving towards the front door and opening it. In the hallway stood a short, round woman wearing a trenchcoat, a hijab, and a frown.

“Hello, Basira,” Jon said warily. “You should probably come in.”

Basira strode into the flat, stopping short at the ensemble of people camped around Melanie’s open-plan loft. “Christ,” she said distantly. “You really did get the whole crew.”

“Technically Peter Lukas did,” Jon grumbled behind her. “I’m just stuck with them now.”

Basira looked around the room uncertainly. Tim and Martin were still sitting on the couch, tensed and cautious. Daisy was standing behind Jon’s armchair, looking uncharacteristically unsure and hopeful.

“Hi Basira,” Melanie said cheerfully, swiveling around in her chair at the computer console. “It’s been ages. How’s the den of evil doing?”

Basira grinned at her gratefully. “It’s a bit busy right now, thanks. Good to see you too, Melanie.”

“Basira, what are you doing here?” Martin asked, trying and failing to keep the sharpness out of his tone.

“Look, I come in peace,” Basira said, holding up her hands. “It’s just . . what the hell do you think you lot are doing?”

Jon sighed. “How much do you know?” He asked, walked past her back into the room, and gesturing for her to sit. Basira ignored him.

“Enough,” she said, crossing her arms. “I know that you’re running a con on Peter Lukas to get that Leitner back. And if I know, Elias knows.”

“What, and you think coming here will make it better?” Tim challenged.

“I can hardly make it worse,” Basira replied. “It’s not like he’s going to be thrilled that I’m tipping you off."

The apartment was tensely silent for several moments.

“Look, Sasha was my friend too,” Basira said, her voice tight with contained frustration. “It’s not like I’m just _okay_ with Elias for killing her. I’d kill him if I could, or put him in prison if I thought it would stick. But there’s also someone suffocating people on the District line and the Corruption is targeting nursing homes now, and if I leave the Institute no one is going to be left to help them. Elias definitely isn’t going to care. I’m trying to choose my battles, and that isn’t the same thing as giving up.”

Jon theoretically knew that when he left the Institute,when he wrenched himself away from the Beholding like he was tearing off a limb, that he was effectively abandoning Basira to the consequences of his actions. At the time, he did it because it was the only ethical recourse he could imagine: he couldn’t stay, even if it meant living a half-life of exhaustion and starvation. He nevertheless felt horribly guilty about Basira’s predicament. Sasha had liked and respected Jon as a boss, but she had adored Basira. The two of them had the same driving inquisitiveness and would volley ideas off of each other in a research session with a joyful mutual fixation. Sasha was good at gently teasing Basira out of her ruthless pragmatism, the same way that she was good at teasing Jon out of his awkward formality, but she and Basira had truly been friends in the way that Jon had never really been able to accomplish.

“Thank you for telling us, Basira,” Jon said quietly. “We appreciate it.”

Basira sighed and shifted. “This isn’t going to stop you, is it?”

“Not really,” Martin said, not unkindly this time. “No.”

A second silence fell on the room as Basira hesitantly glanced over at Daisy, Daisy openly stared at Basira, and everyone else in the room pretended they were looking literally anywhere else.

“Um—” Melanie prompted. “My room is just down the hall. If you two wanted to talk.”

Daisy immediately turned and walked down the hallway, and Basira shot and unimpressed look at Melanie before following her.

“I’m glad that you’re doing better,” Basira said as soon as she entered Melanie’s bedroom. The acoustics probably meant that everyone back in the lounge could still hear her, but Basira was tied to an avatar of eldritch voyeurism and had more or less given up on the idea of personal privacy. “But what the hell are you thinking?”

“I think it’s good for me,” Daisy said quietly. “It helps, being part of a team. I can still hear the blood, but it’s — different. It’s manageable.”

“You’ve said that before,” Basira replied, more harshly than she intended.

“Yeah,” Daisy admitted, winding her fingers through the back of her ponytail. “Yeah. I don’t know how long it’ll last. But it’s a quieter hunt, like this. I’m not just shutting my ears and pretending it doesn’t exist. We’re going after Lukas, but it’s not just on me to take him down.”

Basira was faintly jealous at Daisy’s obvious ease, her sense of anchored surety after working for seventy-two hours with a crew of what Basira knew to be mostly erratic weirdos and also Melanie. Elias still called Basira _Detective_ , and she couldn’t tell if it was for his love of categories, the same with how he used to call Jon _Archivist_ , or if it was an attempt to remind Basira of the partnership she’d lost, and what she’d originally compromised to keep it.

“Since when are you and Jon so friendly, anyways?” Basira asked briskly, trying to change the subject. “I thought you two hated each other.”

Daisy shrugged. “You were the one that insisted that he work my case.”

“I— had a clear conflict of interest,” Basira said, looking down at her shoes. “Anyway, I wouldn’t have responded well to getting carried off in a sack.”

Daisy smiled at her, the kind of open, nakedly fond smile that Basira almost never got when they were partners. “I know,” she said. “I would have tried it much earlier, otherwise.”

Basira laughed, covering her mouth with one hand as her laughter turned harsh and discordant. Her shoulders sagged in a combination of relief and exhaustion, and she just careened into Daisy, resting her forehead on her clavicle and closing her eyes.

Daisy wrapped her arms around her and tucked her chin over the top of her head. “It’s alright,” she said. “You’re alright.” For a moment, Basira willed herself to believe it.

“You don’t have to save the world on your own,” Daisy added softly.

Basira pressed her face deeper into Daisy’s neck. “Ironically, sometimes I really do,” she said. “I have no idea how I signed up for this bullshit.”

Daisy ducked her head down to press a kiss against the top of Basira’s head. “You could join us,” she muttered. “You’d be good here.”

Basira laughed wetly. “Martin would stab me in my sleep. No thanks.”

“Blackwood’s too busy refereeing his two boyfriends to stab you,” Daisy said with the amusement of someone who loved gossip and was trying not to show it. “Plus, I’d stab him first.”

They stayed there, locked in a moment of reunion and relief that they both knew wasn’t going to last.

“Elias knows,” Basira repeated softly, and if anything was going to diffuse whatever was happening, it was _that._ Daisy sighed and stepped back to a safer distance. “I don’t know how much. It hurt him, losing Jon and Sasha in one wave. Just. . . . promise me you’ll be careful. He’ll want to keep Jon alive, but he’d kill the rest of you without blinking.”

Daisy nodded. “I think we’re going to win this,” she said, with uncharacteristic optimism.

Barista looked at her unfathomably and then crossed the room quickly to pull Daisy’s head down into a quick, rushed kiss, before striding out of the room. Daisy stood there for a few moments, cycling between confusion and elation, before leaving Melanie’s room. Basira had apparently already left the apartment without fanfare, and everyone else turned to look at her.

Melanie rolled backward past Daisy in her desk chair, raising an eyebrow. “That seemed to go well,” she said. Daisy grabbed the back of her chair and spun it back towards the wall as Melanie cackled.

* * *

Several miles away, somewhere vaguely near the Kent Downs, Peter Lukas was staring gloomily across the lawn of his family estate when a familiar and highly annoying ringtone starting emanating from his mobile.

Peter sighed and plucked a mobile out the pocket of his peacoat. “Hello, Elias,” he said tiredly. The fog surrounding him gave an erratic billow of irritation.

“Peter!” Elias echoed tinnily through the speakers. “I have some news for you.”

“Can it wait? I’m in the middle of some important business.”

“Oh, I know,” Elias said smugly.“That’s what this is about. The Hoffman Institute employee that you met with today is actually a grifter.”

“Huh,” Peter said. “Is he now? Shame. I liked him.”

“He’s working with Jon and his merry band of thieves. Do you want to know his real name?”

“Honestly, not really,” Peter said, sighing in annoyance. “It’ll make things smoother.”

“They’re going to steal that Leitner again, you know,” Elias continued. “Do you want me to call the Met? I have most sectioned officers on retainer at this point.”

“No,” Peter said. “I want them to come here. It’ll kill two birds with one— well. One house, I guess.”

“Very well,” Elias said, making a face at Peter’s turn of phrase.“Try not to do anything too permanent to my Archivist, Peter. I entertain hopes of getting him back in the Institute eventually.”

“No promises,” Peter replied cheerfully, and hung up his mobile.

* * *

They’d all tried to turn in after Basira left, retreating to their respective rooms or corners and quieting their minds from the constant rehearsal of plans, the reiteration of everything that could go wrong. Melanie went through a careful ritual of shutting down all of her computers, triple-checking the security systems, and saving all of the schematics that they needed for tomorrow. Tim delicately stage-managed the process of sharing a room with Martin, refraining from cracking a single joke and letting the other man leave to prepare for bed first before tentatively following him. As Tim undressed in the dark, he could still hear the soft murmur of Daisy and Jon’s conversation in the lounge on the other side of the door. He tried not to listen for particular words as he laid down to sleep; he assumed it wasn’t going to be anything flattering.

Tim awoke in the odd hours of the night with the hair-trigger reflexes of a thief. Martin was a gently snoring lump on the other end of the room. Tim swung out of bed and padded silently into Melanie’s lounge. While Melanie had drawn down the blinds that covered the glass walls of her apartment, the main floor was still covered in jagged stripes of moonlight. There was a barge coming down the Thames flashing horrible bright lights, loud enough that they might have set Tim off through the crack in the door. He still had ingrained hair-triggers for sudden bursts of light and calliope music.

Jon, the idiot, was asleep in a deeply painful position in his armchair, his neck tilted at a horrible angle and several files overspilling at his fingertips. His glasses were slightly askew, one arm digging into the side of his face.

It was hard to resent Jon like this, which had been Tim’s default position for a while. Jon seemed to think that Tim blamed him for Sasha’s death, which, fair, Tim hadn’t really done anything to correct that assumption. What actually bothered him was the extent to which Tim knew he owed Jon; for turning a blind eye to his and Sasha’s friendship for years, for killing the thing that consumed Sasha so that Tim didn’t have to, for dragging Tim out of that wax museum in Yarmouth, for never resenting his connection to the entity that killed his coworker and friend. That gratitude burned like acid in Tim’s stomach. He hadn’t asked for most of the things Jon had done for him or to him; he hadn’t wanted most of them, at the time.

“Christ,” Tim said, annoyed, and cleared the papers over to the coffee table, trying to keep them within their respective folders. He pulled Jon’s glasses off of his face— glasses he probably didn’t even need now, which was infuriating— and folded them on the table behind him.At last, he lifted Jon out of the armchair and onto the nearby couch. Jon didn’t wake up: Tim, after all, had an extremely lucrative career in stealing priceless artifacts under the noses of very paranoid collectors.

Tim looked down at Jon, splayed bonelessly over the same couch that he and Martin spent the last days staking out like some sort of allied territory while Jon looked cautiously on.

They used to be something close to friends, was the thing. Jon made a lot of fuss about Tim’s horrible influence on Sasha and his criminal tendencies but really had looked the other way to an admirable extent for someone so entangled in the Beholding. Tim, likewise, had routinely slagged Jon off to Sasha but knew that Sasha really liked and respected Jon. Every time they met in person, they acted out this same bit; Jon would complain and harrumph and Tim would purposely ruffle Jon’s feathers, calling him ‘boss’ in order to prod Jon into the same tirade about how he claimed no responsibility for Tim’s crimes or total lack of conduct. It was weird in these last few days, falling into that same dynamic with only a fraction of its previous warmth.

Tim finally threw a blanket over Jon’s sleeping body on the couch and turned, ridding himself of a duty that was never really his, to begin with.

Daisy was standing behind him, holding an unlit cigarette and just looming. No one had gotten the drop on Tim for about five years, and he staggered backward.

For a moment he thought Daisy was going to aggressively defend Jon, but she just gestured over at the glass doors behind the lounge. “I was going to go smoke out on the balcony,” she said simply. “You want to join?”

“Yeah,” Tim said, following her automatically outside the sliding glass door onto the high-rise balcony that Melanie clearly never used. The barge that had woken Tim up had passed, and the Thames was only illuminated with the usual ships passing in the night.

Daisy passed over her cigarette, and Tim took the requisite drag before passing it back. He’d never really been a smoker. Danny went through a phase where he swore he only smoked to get air at clubs, but that was when Tim was an athlete and had passive-aggressively sent his brother a lot of scientific articles about the long-term effects of carcinogens on lung capacity.

Daisy seemed to clock this and didn’t pass it over again.

“So what’s going on with you?” Tim asked recklessly, leaning against the balcony.

Daisy looked over at him, taking another drag of her cigarette. “Lots of things,” she said. “I didn’t think you were in the mood to share.”

Tim looked over the balcony and sighed. “Absolutely not,” he said. "Thanks."

They stood silently, watching the sunrise over the London skyline.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, I wrote that scene where Basira stops in and got very sad about how Basira and OG!Sasha would have been such good friends. 
> 
> Come yell with me in the comments and/or on Tumblr @ arborealoverlords


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